Drawn by its title with the expectation of a documentary about the Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama Renaissance both surprised and charmed me. His Holiness himself eludes (with a grin and a child-like laugh) any attempt to place him in the film's spotlight; appearing at intervals as a sage and socratic contrast to the fractious nature of the delegates, he is jovial, humble and magnetic but it is the academics and their personal journeys that are forever at the fore of this film's narrative.
This is no Seven Years In Tibet. For a start, it is set in India in the Dalai Lama's residence of Dharamsala where 26 hand-picked international boffins travel to in an attempt to solve the world's problems or, as the organisers phrase it, to form a 'synthesis group'. Gather enough bright and brilliant minds together in one place with one goal and surely, surely you will get some answers. What do the Buddhists say? When men make plans...
Enter the egos: Amit Goswami, an opinionated quantum physicist and the loquacious lecturer Fred Alan Wolf, to name but two. Expectations that an answer to the world's pressing problems will be found quickly deflate. The academic squabbling is hair-pullingly (and addictively) frustrating to watch, to the point that I found myself wanting to shout football fan-style advice at the screen - obviously I wouldn't have acted like that if I was there. Would I?
Clearly a labour of love for the director Khashyar Darvich, The Phoenix was the 300th stop on the film's world tour and his passion for the project did not seem diminished in the least (although clearly his sleep patterns had). 5 years in the making, this film is 140 hours of footage condensed into 90 powerful minutes. Weighty subjects are dealt with delicately: economics, politics, spirtuality and, the elephant in the room, Tibet and its tempestuous relationship with China, are all addressed. The film does well to balance these often dark and weighty abstracts with portraits of the stark realities of the conference's context. In one scene, for example, an Indian mother, smiling and swathed in bright and bedraggled cloth, shares a tender moment with her son as she bathes him. This snapshot of simple joy is slowly revealed as the camera broadens the audience's gaze - the family are standing, happy, in a rubbish pile.
There is no escaping the fact that this is a film shot on the stringiest of shoe-string budgets. Filmed with a skeleton crew of 18 (17 after one of the sound guys became so transfixed by the Dalai Lama's words that he was unable to hold a microphone); the director himself confessed to have filmed this on a voluntary basis.
Sitting in screen two of the Picture House, the film's haunting soundtrack of traditional Tibetan chimes was at times punctuated with the thunder of next door's Dark Knight Rises. A reminder, if we needed it, of the different nature of this film. Renaissance need not be life-changing, but even if you don't come to it with an open mind, be prepared to leave with one.