Philly filmmaker’s 'Digital Dharma' heads for Tel Aviv

 

By Neal Dhand

Film Critic

 

The title of the new documentary by Philadelphia filmmaker and producer Dafna Yachin might sound like an oxymoron: “Digital Dharma.” Combining the technology age with an ancient Eastern philosophical principle is, however, not as contradictory as surface definitions might indicate.

 

The film hinges on Gene Smith. If in some learned alternate universe “Library Man” were a superhero, Smith would be it. An affable Library of Congress worker, he segues his would-be desk job into the ultimate quest for Tibetan writings, seeking to amass as many as he can and preserve them.

 

“We’ve produced around the world for Discovery and other projects that were commissioned…. But we were very lucky to have the main person in our film, Gene Smith. He’s so loved … and it’s because of him that we got such great access,” Yachin explains.

 

The access she refers to is one of the best parts of “Digital Dharma.” Yachin and company follow Smith into India, Nepal, Bhutan, and on an aborted Chinese trip in 2008, as he sifts through material and makes friends.

 

Though interviews with philosopher Matthieu Ricard and filmmaker Khyentse Norbu, among others, help to shape the narrative, it’s Smith who’s clearly the subject. Yachin’s camera constantly follows him through crowded marketplaces and watches from a distance as he embraces old acquaintances.

 

Smith is a large presence, the director says, “He was truly a peacemaker. Not since, someone said to me, Nixon, has someone been able to maneuver with the Chinese … and the Tibetans.”

 

While Yachin’s film took seven years to make, it doesn’t compare to the enormous, exciting undertaking of discovering a near-extinct literary tradition and also of preserving the texts.

 

Yachin recalls some of her first interactions with Smith: “In the back of Barney’s in New York … were these 1,500-year-old texts because there’s no place to keep them. That’d be like putting the original Bible back in somebody’s basement.”

 

That a good number of these texts end up on flash drives and mini-Macs in the film is one of the visual ironies. Perhaps the best scene of “Digital Dharma” shows a Tibetan lama removing a USB drive from a pouch around his neck.

 

Yachin and senior editor Timothy Gates punctuate the moment with a close-up to emphasize centuries of evolution: that’s a whole lot of once-thought-lost, rare words on a really small, unstable-looking modern device.

 

Despite Smith’s presence, the film wasn’t always an easy feat.

 

“Delhi was our most difficult place. It’s crowded, and with shooting around the historic monuments, people can give you some issues if you don’t pay the government,” Yachin says.

 

But it wasn’t only the shooting that proved complicated.

 

“[Gene] just wanted the movie to be about the other lamas,” Yachin explains. “We really had to film almost backwards and create an arc of a story.” Together with writer Arthur Fischman, they craft a narrative that not only informs, but also packs a twist towards the end.

 

Now that the film is making the rounds — it screens at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art as part of The International Art Film Festival on Feb. 28 — Yachin is hoping that there’s another outcome still to be seen. “There’s a handful of women [in Philadelphia] doing international work,” she says, hoping that “Digital Dharma” puts the female filmmaker voice more on the map.