INTERNATIONAL SHOWCASE - SPONSORED BY

Playing on Friday, March 31 at 6:45 PM at Regal - Purchase tickets
Playing on Sunday, April 2 at 1:00 PM at Regal - Purchase tickets

THE GIANT BUDDHAS
SWITZERLAND, 2005, 95 MIN
DIRECTED BY CHRISTIAN FREI
IN ENGLISH, DARI, ARABIC, FRENCH, & MANDARIN W/ ENGLISH SUBTITLES
EAST COAST PREMIERE
In February of 2001, Taliban leaders in Afghanistan ordered all non-Muslim statues destroyed. By March, the 1500-year-old colossal Buddha statues in the valley of Bamiyan—one of them the largest representation of Buddha in the world at fifty-three meters high—were blown to pieces. Oscar-nominated director Christian Frei (War Photographer) uses this dramatic event as the starting point for this beautifully shot and profound cinematic essay examining terrorism and tolerance, ignorance and identity, fanaticism and faith. THE GIANT BUDDHAS takes a number of paths on its elusive and poetic journey to conjure the past and sift the present: from the travels of a 7th century Chinese monk on a spiritual quest along the Silk Road to India, to a French archeologist on a mission to excavate the legendary “sleeping Buddha,” potentially the largest statue in human history; from the aborted reconstruction of the Bamiyan Buddha as a kitschy tourist attraction in China, to the reflections of an Afghan writer in Canada who has a picture of her father posing with the now destroyed Buddhas.