Based
on the international bestseller by Eugen Herrigel
Script: Steve Hudson
Status: Financing.
Pre-production support, Filmstiftung NRW;
Screenplay development support, FFA (German Federal Film Board)
Script available.
Co-Production: Germany-Japan
Co-Producer: Kiyoshi Mizokami, Twin-M Company, Tokyo.
Zen in the Art of Archery
One Life. One Shot.
Based on the international bestseller by Eugen Herrigel - one of the first and still the most powerful account of a Westerner's encounter with Japanese spirituality. Zen in the Art of Archery has sold millions of copies worldwide and been translated into over 20 languages.
In 1924, Herrigel, a German philosopher, took up a teaching position at one of Japan's new European-style universities. When he left Europe, he was the bright young hope of German philosophy. When he returned, he never published another work of philosophy again.
In between lie five years studying Kyudo - Japanese archery - under Kenzo Awa, one of most gifted and mystical masters of the art that Japan has ever seen.
The two men could not be less alike: One a rational European intellectual, the other an impulsive and wrathful samurai. For Awa, Kyudo is not a sport, not a technical exercise - it is a means of experiencing an existence that shatters the illusion of reality.
Herrigel undergoes five years of suffering, of incomprehension, of false turns, as a rational mind attempts to grasp a way of being that demands an absence of mind. He is driven to the utmost limits of his understanding, until in the end, in the darkness of despair, he is forced to surrender everything he thinks he is: his career, his work, his mind, even his own will.
In return, though, he touches something much more valuable than all of these:
Sartori. Enlightement.