“Overcoming Obstacles” With Japanese Filmmaker, Yujiro Seki
“I wanted to make something that speaks to my soul and to the world. I wanted to make a piece of work that would last long after I die. This is when I decided to work on the subject about the Buddhist sculptors of Japan, Būshi.”
I had the pleasure of interviewing Filmmaker Yujiro Seki. His latest project, Carving The Divine is a documentary that offers a rare and intimate look into the life and artistic process of modern-day Būshi — practitioners of a 1400 year lineage of woodcarving that’s at the beating heart of Japanese, Mahayana Buddhism.
What is your “backstory”?
I first encountered the magic of cinema when I was in high school. I felt the power of creating a world out of nothing. As I was making my first feature film, Sokonashi Deka (Enigmatic Detective) I fell so much in love with the process that I vowed to master the art of cinema and become a great director like Akira Kurosawa. As naive as that sounds, I was dead serious so I convinced my parents that I wanted to study film in the United States. I thought I had a bright future ahead.
