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(via zLounge)
check out this movie trailer. it's going to be shown in Seattle :)
OPENS FRIDAY OCT. 27th IN SEATTLE & ST. LOUIS!
THE STORY
A nameless detective, still mourning the loss of his wife, investigates a mysterious death in a Buddhist temple, but his logical, left-brained crime-solving skills are useless in the intuitive, non-linear world of Zen.
While attempting to question the inhabitants of the temple – Ed, a monk with an attitude and secrets to hide; Jane, a beautiful, mysterious, bald femme fatale; and the Master, an infuriatingly obscure Zen teacher, who does a lot of strange things with oranges – the Detective’s logical mind is thwarted at every turn by his suspects' Zen thinking…
Detective: Where were you at the time of the murder?
Monk: What exactly do you mean by time?
Increasingly confused and unnerved, haunted by his dead wife’s ghost, and with his investigation going nowhere, the Detective finds himself drawn into a deeper, darker, more personal mystery, where he must confront terrifying questions about love and loss, which lead to a startling realization: the mystery he's there to solve isn't a murder at all, but the mystery of death itself.
EVOLUTION OF THE STORY
ZEN NOIR began more than ten years ago, when I was meditating in a Buddhist temple at 5 a.m. Keenly aware of all the half-asleep people sitting in the room, I was suddenly struck with an odd thought: “what would happen if one of us just keeled over, dead?”
From that moment, the ideas slowly evolved: Western vs. Eastern views of death; Love vs. the inevitable fact that Everything Changes; and finally, Logic vs. Reality.
It was this last thought that brought me to the idea of Film Noir. In Film Noir, the detective often sets out to solve one mystery, but ends up finding another, deeper mystery, and having to confront dark, sometimes frightening truths.
The dictionary defines the word “mystery” as either “a conundrum that must be solved” or as “a work of fiction dealing with a puzzling crime, usually a murder.” But there is a third, older definition as well, and it was this definition that finally merged Zen and Noir in my mind. The original definition of the word “mystery” was something along the lines of: “a spiritual truth beyond rational understanding, that can only be experienced through direct revelation.”
In Zen Buddhism, this type of mystery is often expressed as a koan. A koan is a teaching riddle the master poses to the student that cannot be solved with logic. The koan most Westerners are familiar with is: “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” On the surface, the question is absurd, because no amount of reason or logic will lead you to an answer. But there is an answer: the answer is who you become as you explore the question, what you discover about yourself, the universe, and all of existence.
It was with this single idea that whole project came together for me: I would make a murder mystery in which the murder is a koan. And the film itself will be a koan for the audience.
A decade later, all of these ideas, along with a few 800-year-old Chinese jokes, have somehow come together as ZEN NOIR.
Enjoy the Mystery.
-Marc Rosenbush
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