Episode #89: Depicting a Golden Kingdom
When films examine a subject in detail, it’s sometimes described as a “meditation on…” that particular theme. Golden Kingdom, a 2015 film by Brian Perkins, fits this expression uniquely, in more ways than one.
A dedicated meditator who has spent years practicing throughout Asia, Brian—along with his whole crew--slept in the monastery for the duration of the shoot, and he spent every morning meditating before he started filming. In fact, besides coloring the overall direction of the movie, Brian’s practice impacted many of the artistic choices he made over the course of filming.
For example, there is an extended scene of monks sitting in meditation. He explains, “[Meditation] gave me the courage to stay with certain shots in the film longer, to make certain choices that I would not normally have made where a lot of people were saying, ‘No, you can't. You have to cut here, you really can't just hold on them meditating.’ And knowing that the patience and creating space for the silence, that something can be born in that. It's not going to come for every viewer, but at least it gives the viewers a chance to have an experience inside themselves objectively, where they can sit in the discomfort.”
Golden Kingdom tells the story of four Buddhist novices in Shan State, whose Sayadaw is called away on urgent business, leaving them alone in a remote monastery. The plot then takes a dark turn when conflict breaks out, and survival becomes the central issue. However, the story does not proceed in a linear-logical, Western fashion; Burmese folk elements begin to blend into reality, and a childlike perspective creeps in as a way to shape the audience’s understanding of what is taking place through the eyes of the young novices. Parts of the movie appear as a kind of dreamscape, with several characters appearing for just short periods of time, including some who look to be either ghosts or figments of the imagination.
Brian admits to consistent feedback from viewers who wanted a clearer understanding of what was happening in the film, and even when the story was happening. Yet he does not want to provide easy answers, explaining that “to tie it to a specific moment or specific event, seems to be doing it a disservice, because I wanted it to be able to speak to different moments or different situations, which unfortunately is the case now, when we're finding we're back in a situation where these kinds of things are happening in Myanmar once again. But I found it very interesting that people wanted almost to comfort themselves to feel a certain surety.”
But if there is one thing Golden Kingdom doesn’t do, is give any kind of surety. Scenes are as hauntingly beautiful as they are disturbing and incomplete, and Brian’s aforementioned meditative approach lingers in, and perhaps even extends, this discomfort. Brian rejected the typical Western narrative expectation of the bad guys getting their “just desserts” at the film’s end. Brian notes that “for this topic, these characters, and this environment… it just doesn't make sense for me.” In his extensive research of Burmese folk tales, Brian found that the concept of karma in these stories often flips the typical Western perspective structure on its head.
“It's understood that in some way, the bad guy or whoever is going to get their just desserts in another lifetime, that the karma is going to be distributed into different reincarnations. And so that radically destabilizes what we think we know about narrative, if we're going across different lifetimes.”
The genesis of the film itself is remarkable. When Brian was visiting Myanmar some years before, he stumbled across the monastery during a hike The setting left a deep impression on him, and he began to wonder what would happen if the young novices there were somehow left alone in such an isolated place… and an idea for a film appeared to him full-blown. “It just came to me,” he remembers. “And it almost emerged fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s head in a strange way.”
Brian’s hiking guide asked the Sayadaw on his behalf if he would allow Brian to come back some day to shoot a film, and he was given permission. However, making this dream a reality was not easy! In making his preparations to return, Brian found himself on a government blacklist, and realized that he had somehow spoken too openly to the wrong person. But he eventually found a way in, arriving on just a one-week visa, and his crew had to disassemble and smuggle in much of the operating equipment. It was a long hike away from the nearest town, and so everything had to be hauled in on bamboo poles… and that included generators, because the remote, Shan monastery didn’t have any electricity.
Once the film was completed, the digital files were copied on hard disks, and smuggled out on flights out of the country by friends unaffiliated with the movie. Meanwhile, one of his translators tried to extort him, and Brian had overstayed his meagre one-week visa, so had to pay a “fixer” to be able to exit the country.
Still, it was all worth it in the end, especially the experience of working with so many novice actors. Most were local villagers, hand-selected by Brian and his team. The Sayadaw and three of the novices in the film are actual monks, and the fourth novice ordained for the making of the film (the scene of his head being shaven was his actual ordination).
In fact, this authenticity was one of the factors that had motivated Brian to want to make a film there. He notes how in that village, few people had ever seen a camera or a cell phone at that point, let alone watched a movie! “I was really interested in seeing if I could capture a certain kind of performance from them because especially in the West, oftentimes you turn a camera on a kid and they that kind of innocence or artlessness disappears, because they've been trained since they were infants. Like, ‘I'm taking a picture or we're filming you, and this is what people who are getting filmed should behave like.’ And oftentimes working with children… [is they] will kind of put on a different persona, trying to be something else. And what I really wanted to get at was the simplicity and relative timelessness of their existence, that wasn't impinged upon by media at the time.”
Brian has graciously permitted the Burma Spring Benefit Film Festival to stream Golden Kingdom, so any interested viewer can watch this before the event’s end on February 13th. There is no fee to stream films, although film organizers encourage donations, which go towards urgent humanitarian projects in Myanmar.
Brian encourages listeners to “take the opportunity to watch the film and support the festival because it's really important that we help everyone who's working on these efforts in the country right now. Because there's not been a lot of hope recently. And unfortunately, I think it's going to be incumbent upon people outside the country to start putting pressure to make things happen, because otherwise, it's just going to stay the same. So please go take part in the festival and donate what you can.”
Brian shares the following links, regarding points he referenced in the talk:
Swami Medhananda aka Ayon Maharaj (Brian’s former roommate, now in an Indian monastery)