Coming to theatres today, Friday, November 21: MONK WITH A CAMERA
Guido Santi and Tina Mascara’s profile of a well-heeled photographer turned Tibetan Buddhist monk debuted at IDFA last year. Other festival stops have included Palm Springs, Ashland, Full Frame, Cleveland, Documentary Edge, and Sedona.
Grandson to legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and a photographer who worked with Irving Penn and Richard Avedon in the 1970s, Nicky Vreeland surprised friends and admirers alike when he gave up his glamorous lifestyle for the asceticism of Tibetan Buddhism. At the same time, as hinted in Santi and Mascara’s portrait, he hasn’t really completely abandoned the trappings of celebrity and wealth – after all, it’s not every monk who works directly with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, or who is appointed by the spiritual leader to be an abbot. While the filmmakers acknowledge some of the contradictions of Vreeland’s comportment – largely dwelling, as signaled by the project’s title, on his continued interest in photography despite Buddhism’s foregrounding of ephemerality – they never particularly push too hard to make sense of their subject’s ability to keep one sandal in the material world. While never quite descending into straight hagiography, the generally likeable film remains fairly slight, and doesn’t seem to take full advantage of the possibilities presented by its unusual subject.
what (not) to doc 