Dalai Lama Renaissance on AllMovie

As the curtain rapidly fell on the 20th Century, his holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, grew so deeply troubled by the state of the modern world that he invited 40 pivotal Western thinkers to his secluded home in Northern India's Himalayan Mountains, for a lengthy and pointed brainstorming session on the problems of contemporary society and how to solve them most effectively. Foreseeing the importance of this event, documentarist Khashyar Darvich joined the group with an 18-member, 5-camera crew in tow (sponsored by the Wakan Foundation for the Arts) and sought to capture the event on film. This yielded some 140 hours of video footage, edited down to feature length for Darvich's documentary Dalai Lama Renaissance. The film preserves, in 80 minutes, the most insightful, illuminative and engaging dialogues from Gyatso's conference. Oscar-nominated actor Harrison Ford (Frantic) narrates.