The film Zen and Bones is a kaleidoscopic portrait of an unconventional 93-year-old Japanese-American Zen monk, his dramatic history and turbulent family life. Fiction and animation adds to create a motley concoction of fascinating true stories. The film screening will be followed by a panel discussion with director Takayuki Nakamura and Gretchen Mittwer, the daughter of Henry Mittwer.

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93-year-old Zen monk Henry Mittwer is determined to make a movie – about an orphaned child’s longing for her mother. He himself was torn from his Japanese mother when World War II broke out. This film tells the story of an idiosyncratic free spirit with a mother complex, covering his childhood in Yokohama, his wartime in various U.S. Nikkei camps, as a 1960s American dad-turned-Zen monk, and his lifelong passion for movies.

At his seasoned age, Henry should be living his remaining days in peace in his Kyoto temple residence. But his greatest passion and dream is to make a film. For years, he has been pitching his project Red Shoes to Kyoto movie studios and financiers. Apparently, the Buddhist search for nothingness does not interfere with this obsession of his.

Born in 1918 in Yokohama to an American father who ran United Artists’ Far East Office and a former geisha, Henry grew up in Japan. At 22, he travels to America by ship to search for his father. Soon World War II breaks out and he is detained in concentration camps for enemy Japanese. He marries Sachiko and has three children, of which two were born in the camps. In 1961, he returns to Japan and becomes a Zen Buddhist monk and emissary for the Urasenke Tradition of Tea.

Henry falls ill in 2012 and is admitted to the hospital. The documentary crew continues to film, uncovering evidence and gathering testimonies about his extraordinary past from movie moguls, U.S. government files, and interviews with Zen masters. The truth behind Henry’s obsession for filmmaking slowly takes shape. Meanwhile, actors play out Henry’s life as a young man, and an animated version of Henry’s dream film comes true.

Bios

Director / Takayuki Nakamura 中村高寛
Born in 1975, Nakamura’s home town is Yokohama. He started his career in 1997 as an assistant director at Shochiku’s Ofuna studios. From 1999 to 2001, he studied at the Beijing Film Academy majoring in film performing arts and documentary theory. After returning to Japan, he worked under Chinese filmmaker Li Ying on feature documentaries Dream Cuisine (co-pro with NHK) and the controversial Yasukuni. He has worked extensively in TV documentary and corporate films. Yokohama Mary (2005), awarded over 11 film prizes in Japan, was his theatrical debut film as director. It was released in over 50 cinemas nationwide and grossed over 1 million dollars. He currently teaches at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image. Zen and Bones is his second feature.

Featuring / Gretchen Kyoko Mittwer
Henry Mittwer’s daughter. Born at Tule Lake, California on July 5, 1945. As a child, Gretchen attended weekly Urasenke chanoyu lessons (with Susie Matsumoto) in LA, while her father went to Zen sessions nearby (with Nyogen Senzaki). She spent two and a half years living in a dormitory and attending a high school run by Soto Zen sect, Yokohama, in Japan, before receiving an Associate of Arts from Pasadena City College. After college, Gretchen spent a summer at the New York World’s Fair Japan Pavilion Urasenke tea house. In 1965, she moved with mother and younger sister to Kyoto, Japan, where father had entered Zen temple and begun training at Urasenke chanoyu headquarters. Gretchen helped her father inaugurate the journal Chanoyu Quarterly: Tea and the Arts of Japan (1970-1999, 88 issues. Urasenke Foundation, Kyoto) and publish his book The Art of Chabana: Flowers for the Tea Ceremony (Tuttle: December, 1974). Following a disastrous marriage in Kyoto, Gretchen returned to Pasadena with her two children. She moved to Kyoto again in 1980, and became editor of the Chanoyu Quarterly. Employed by Urasenke, Kyoto, ever since.