International Buddhist Film Festival Official Selection
WORLD PREMIERE | SCREENING + PANEL
Director Colin Still in person
With Special Guests: Peter Coyote, Jane Hirshfield, Jack Shoemaker
This is the first feature-length film documenting the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet/activist Gary Snyder. A participant in the famed 1955 Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco that launched the Beat era (and the careers of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), Snyder later lived and studied in Japan, becoming a Zen teacher. He is the model for the character of Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s bestselling novel, The Dharma Bums.
The film was skillfully assembled and remastered from the filmmaker’s original 1990s 16mm footage shot for British television, and offers a vivid self portrait of the famously elusive poet and essayist through his poems and commentary. Filmed on location at his Kitkitdizzie/Ring of Bone Zendo home in the Sierra and other locations connected with him, it also features key archival footage from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as contemporaneous readings and commentary by Peter Coyote, Jane Hirshfield, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Shoemaker, and Michael McClure, and a precious interview with Snyder’s late wife Carole Koda.
Director Colin Still (UK 2024) 102 min. + panel
SUNDAY, MARCH 9 • 4:30
$15 General | $13 Seniors & Youth | $10 CAFILM members