My Reincarnation

The protagonist of this film, shot over a number of years by award-winning documentary-maker Jennifer Fox, is Yeshi, the son of a Tibetan spiritual master. His father escaped from Tibet after the Chinese occupation and settled in Italy, where he started a family. The film begins in 1989, when Yeshi is 18 and more interested in a career as a photographer and living a completely normal life than he is in Buddhist teachings. Above all, however, he is troubled by his complicated relationship with his father, who only sees his son as the reincarnation of a monk called Khyentse and someone who should thereby maintain the disappearing Dzogchen offshoot of Tibetan Buddhist teaching. But young Yeshi has no time for such notions, and 13 years later we see him as a content IBM employee who is himself the father of a small child. As the years pass, however, he discovers that Buddhist doctrine is nowhere near as alien to him as he first thought, and that his father's desire for him to travel to Tibet and bless the faithful there, who are convinced of his reincarnation, is not such a foolish idea after all. This intimate portrait of a complex father-son relationship, which evolves over 20 years against a backdrop of Buddhist faith, offers a unique insight into a direct confrontation between Eastern philosophy and a Western lifestyle. It recounts the difficult fate of Tibetans forced to live in exile.