Yujiro Seki
Yujiro Seki, Director
Winning for Best Director of Foreign Language Documentary at the 2019 Milan International Filmmaker Festival, Carving the Divine offers a rare and intimate look into the life and artistic process of modern-day Būshi — practitioners of a 1400-year lineage of woodcarving that’s at the beating heart of Japanese, Mahayana Buddhism.
Over the course of the past several years, Yujiro Seki singlehandedly planned, shot, and edited this feature length documentary. At this point, he needs your support to help fund the monthly operational cost to promote his film in Digital Marketing and Publicity. Please visit Patreon to contribute.
The stakes are high for the apprentices: the daily (and nightly) demands of a lifelong commitment to mastery prove too much for most to bear. But for those devoted enough to fulfill their duties to the guild and to themselves as Būshi, there’s the promise of contributing to collective works of awe-inspiring beauty and power. And even more importantly, there’s the promise of leading their millennium-old tradition into the future.
“Living among these Būshi for the years necessary to document them transforming blocks of wood into incredible sculptures, I was able to gain access into the secretive world of some of Japan’s foremost masters, capturing a world of Buddhist rituals normally off-limits to all but monks and priests. My proudest achievement in Carving the Divine is that I believe the finished film does a good job of showing how these two traditions — Mahayana Buddhism and the art of the Būshi — both sculpt and are sculpted by Japan itself, and how the struggles of today’s Būshi reflect the historical struggles of the Japanese People — to ‘persevere,’ as we Japanese so often say.” — Yujiro Seiki.
For more information about the documentary
“Carving the Divine” please visit
www.carvingthedivine.com
Please visit Patreon to see Yujiro’s fundraising campaign.
