User Score
1 votes
Written and directed by Dillon M. Banda, 'Spirit' is a celebration of the human spirit, shot on location across Nepal in Kathmandu, Pokhara, at Pashupatinath temple, and at the Nagi Gompa, Namo Buddha, Tamang and Kanying Sherub Ling monasteries. The film's action follows a community of nuns and monks, young and old, as they prepare for a major ceremony, and is based on a poem spoken from the perspective of a narrator questioning the nature of their own existence.
Director
Writer
Status
Released
Original Language
EN
The movie arose out of our sparetime as teenagers with fresh driver’s licenses and cobbled-together camera gear, wandering around a tired and honestly pretty grim post-industrial mill community, reinforced with after-hours access to the darkroom at the Sun Journal (where Aaron’s dad was the visuals editor), and some half-formed education in the techniques of Robert Frank, Frederick Wiseman, Dogme 95, Italian neorealism, pre-Obama Shepard Fairey, plus whatever culture pushed its way through the creaky pipes of low-bandwidth dial-up internet, or was smuggled up the actual superhighway of I-95 from Boston and eventually New York, or mailed first class via United States Postal Service from a burgeoning Netflix in those classic matte red envelopes, as valuable and rare as cash sent from China. [...] Somehow we negotiated access to a Canon XL1 3-CCD MiniDV camera and shotgun mic from the local public access station, in exchange for taping the high school graduation we didn’t participate in.
