Chasing The Light – Film Review
by Brian Merriman

Written and Directed by: Maurice O’Brien
Produced by: Clare Stronge
Cinematography by Patrick Jordan and Maurice O Brien
Editing by Iseult Howlett and Paul Mullen

Duration 89 minutes

With Irish film industry and RTE support, this latest documentary brings us a visual feast as we go behind the scenes in Dzogchen Beara, a unique Tibetan Buddhist retreat founded in the spectacular location of  West Cork in the 1970s.

Writer, Maurice O’Brien, tells the story with huge empathy and understanding for the central Buddhist tenet of peace and kindness. This is no shocking expose, it is a gentle journey of a couple who want to share safety, reflection and refuge with a very different Ireland of the 1970s. To do so, they find the most spectacular ruined farmhouse in a breathtaking Beara location. Director O’Brien captures the mood and beguilement of the coastline, that first enraptured Peter and Harriet Cornish to move there, with spectacular drone footage and envious natural light.

The story treats not only its subjects but the history of the project, with tenderness and truth. We meet those still working there and hear their journeys to escape their pressurised or traumatic world. They meditate and grow only to try to make sense of it when it comes crashing down, as the real ethics of their teacher lama Sogyal Rinpoche are revealed. The irony of the humble Cornish who felt he could never be a teacher, is a total contrast to Rinpoche’s ego, who pours through the screen. It is perhaps Cornish’s only flaw, not to see the real teacher within himself. This documentary testifies to his wisdom.

Happily Rinpoche’s criminal conduct is not allowed to suffocate the narrative or eclipse the good intent. Cornish, is a shy man, who with his wife Harriet, find and share something wonderful in an Ireland dominated by the power, control and corruption of one organised religion. In escaping from that life, he finds himself confronted by it in many other ways, showing how religions have far more in common than what they insist divides them, the hands in prayer, the beads, the iconography, the scandals.

Patrick Jordan and O’Brien’s cinematography, together with Iseult Howlett and Paul Mullen’s artistic editing, are visually stunning and once again harness the uniquely rich setting, that the Irish coastal landscape’s palate of light and shade illuminates the screen throughout.

There is such a strong sense of kindness throughout the narrative, the community and the presentation, that it leaves the criminal revelations as a secondary plot, such is the force of good intent that no criminal exploiter deserves to eradicate. This film will encourage many more to discover not only the beauty of Beara, but the peace and sincerity of those within Dzogchen Beara.

The use of footage from the past, a glimpse of an Ireland gone by and the building of our first Buddhist Temple, fill out the plot as it makes its gentle deliberate way through 50 years of ‘chasing the light’, in a remote and beautiful part of our Island.

Just like Cornish, O’Brien doesn’t end up chasing the light, he basks in its glow in this charming story of unselfish people, who remind us just how special we and our landscape are.