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TUKDAM

By Donagh COLEMAN

Documentary - Post-Production 2020

Through stories of Tibetan meditators staying lifelike after death, the Tibetan Buddhis practice of Tukdam, this documentary delves into questions of life and death, and where the line between is drawn.

- Year of production
- 2020
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- IRELAND, FINLAND, ESTONIA
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Budget
- 0.6 - 1 M$
- Duration
- 80 mn
- Director(s)
- Donagh COLEMAN
- Producer(s)
- Pille RÜNK (ALLFILM OÜ), Kaarle AHO (MAKING MOVIES OY), Martha O'NEILL (WILDFIRE FILMS AND TELEVISION PRODUCTIONS LTD)
- Synopsis
- This is a film about life and death, and where we draw the line between them. We look at such fundamental questions through the focal point of a Tibetan Buddhist tradition of dying that blurs life and death to an unprecedented degree. In what Tibetans call “tukdam”, meditators die in a consciously controlled manner in meditation. Though declared clinically dead, they stay sitting upright in meditation; remarkably, their bodies remain fresh and lifelike, without any signs of decay for days, sometimes weeks after clinical death.
  
  What is going on here? These deaths present a mystery that the documentary tries to unravel. The film’s arc takes us from the Tibetan world where we first encounter tukdam, to modern hospitals (where such deaths also occur), and finally deeper into modern medicalized dying and the science of death, as we seek to understand tukdam and the big questions this opens up.
  
  This arc from East to West unfolds through dramatic death stories, told by witnesses impacted by their encounters with these extraordinary deaths. The film will thus have an episodic structure, with each death story building on the others.
  
  Thus what starts out as an investigation of an exotic Tibetan way of dying brings us back to face our own understandings of death, and ways of dying. The deeper we go into the science of death, the more blurry we find this to be; disturbingly, there is no scientific consensus on what constitutes death, brain death, consciousness or personhood. This feature documentary will challenge our assumptions on dying, and upset popular ideas of death as something clear-cut. And, it will make us see the way we die in hospitals in the modern West as something just as strange as the far-off deaths of Tibetan meditators.
  
  We have unprecedented access to the culturally and religiously sensitive phenomenon of tukdam through the support of Tibetan spiritual leaders the Dalai Lama and the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje (widely seen as next in line after the Dalai Lama),.