Zen Movies

Two middle aged German brothers - one New Age and recently divorced, the other uptight and sceptical - travel to a Zen monastery in Japan in search...

Vietnam 1791. Old Truong, the Emperor’s Master of Arms, feels the end of his life coming. But he has yet to find a successor. The country has...

Gu Sheng-zhai, an artist in his early 30s, still lives with his mother, but he is suddenly shaken by the arrival of Yang Hui-zhen, a mysterious...

Tsutomu lives alone in the mountains, writing essays, cooking Zen food with the vegetables he grows and the mushrooms he picks in the hills. His...

The influential life and powerful messages of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh are explored in this biographical documentary. For more than...

After a big fight, a couple wakes up with an unbelievable problem: he can't speak and she can't hear anything. Doctors and exams are useless. A...

In the early 1200s, Dogen brought Chinese Zen philosophy to Japan, and established the Japanese Zen school of Buddhism. He taught that a person was...

A film about modern Japanese architecture, its roots in the Japanese tradition and its impact on the Nordic building-tradition. Winding its way...

Frank, an introspective astrophysics major, visits a remote lab to work with his mentor; doctor Roberts. After his arrival, he finds that Helen; a...

Max Gimblett: Original Mind documents the life and process of eccentric, creative genius Max Gimblett. One of New Zealand’s most successful and...

Two monks on a mission choose very different paths

A documentary exploring the rigorous training and meditation practices found at the Shōgen-ji, a Zen Buddhist monastery of the Rinzai school in...

The entangled relations between the son of a seductive tea-ceremony teacher and the women in his father's life. Based on the novel by Kawabata...

Dealing heavily with perceptions of time, Aeon documents the urban cityscape as Wellington transforms through a zen-influenced eternal cycle of...

About three monks in a remote monastery; an aging master, a small orphan and a young man who left his city life to seek Enlightenment.

Evoking a cinema verite feel not found in most sports documentaries, Fast Break examines the 1977 Portland Trailblazers basketball team in a...

An immigrant in Istanbul, the Russian filmmaker finds himself caught between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand, his legal status becomes...

Reeling from his sister’s death, a NYC playwright searches for fulfillment in a sex-and-drug filled odyssey. When he’s reunited with a...

Alan Watts talks about our perception of the world, and how we derive metaphysics from it. Watts recorded this video in 1971 as a pilot for a public...

Weaving together original film and photographic archives, A CLOUD NEVER DIES tells the story of a humble young Vietnamese monk and poet whose wisdom...