4.5/5
Review by John P. Harvey.
Meeting the Buddha is Márta György Kessler’s second feature-length documentary. Though not making it evident, the film was in fact created as a sequel to Kessler’s earlier (2014) documentary, Hannah, which focused on the lifelong contribution of Danish hippy Hannah Nydahl to bringing a lineage of Buddhism to the West.
Meeting the Buddha, filmed in close to a dozen countries (including Australia) over five years, introduces us properly to Hannah’s husband, Ole Nydahl: as a boy, as a wild teenager, and as a young hippy and open-hearted seeker who ultimately became a Buddhist lama.
Ole and Hannah’s journey into Buddhism began when the “King of the Yogis”, the 16th Karmapa, or master, of the Buddhist lineage, Karma Kagyu, met Ole and Hannah and recognised their potential as students and as teachers and communicators. They in turn recognised the 16th Karmapa’s uplifting effect on all in his company.
Without delving too much into the Karmapa’s particular teachings, Meeting the Buddha demonstrates the attitudes, the values, and the strengths that the discipline’s Karmapa inculcated in his audiences, their especial relevance to those in the West, and Ole and Hannah’s means of passing those teachings on to enquirers from many cultures and in many languages. We also meet an array of good-humoured lamas and see them in action. And, throughout Ole and Hannah’s mission to bring Buddhism to the West, their lifelong mutual love and affection are a luminous constant.
As a significant documentary of the arrival of the Karma Kagyu strand of Buddhism in the West, Meeting the Buddha uses historical footage to advantage as well as more contemporary clips of interviews with spiritual leaders and politicians with close knowledge of the actors involved. Intermittent employment of both simple 2D animated cartoons and sophisticated 3D animations of telling photographs also provides interesting variety.
Through all this, the film helps paint a picture of the political turmoil from which the Karmapa, along with many of his followers, escaped Tibet into self-imposed exile on the eve of capture by Chinese invaders. It highlights Ole and Hannah’s unflagging work in teaching, translating, interpreting, fundraising, building Buddhist centres, and hosting visits by the Karmapa and his greatest disciples to various countries. And it shows the effects on many individual lives of the positivity and newfound confidence that Buddhism brought them. It’s a film replete with optimism and warmth even as it describes and depicts some of the more difficult moments of its various protagonists’ journeys.
Screening in March–April 2026 in Sydney, Newcastle, Byron Bay, and Gold Coast Palace cinemas and in various locations as organised by local Buddhist centres; up-to-date details on the Meeting the Buddha web site.