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Month of October, 2010
It took a long time to put this film together. In 1983, Chogyam Trungpa asked me to make a Shambhala film. The teachings of Shambhala, the path, were still very new and I wasn't sure what that meant. What would a Shambhala film be about? certain principles? A way of life? And for several years after Chogyam Trungpa's death, nothing happened, and I didn't think about that conversation.

In maybe the early nineties I started tracing my own past, and took up the idea again. In '95 I got initial approval from Trungpa's son and Shambhala heir, Sakyong Mipham to make a film about his father. I started pulling footage from my archives; my ex-husband Baird Bryant and I had shot several films with Trungpa. And in '02 I began to record some of the interviews that appear in the film. Then things fell apart, as they often do in the long life of a documentary; it took two more years just to get full formal approval. Now, here we are in 2010 and the film is finally in final cut.

My goal has been to use the ideas, the questions, the moments in the film to create an open mindedness in the viewer about Trungpa, to film without bias and let him confront the world directly. And let the audience have their own journey. Making a documentary is like starting a painting with a blank canvas. Documentaries are wide open, and a filmmaker learns to sense when one is unfolding correctly. This film is a portrait, and I've tried not to impose my own ideas on it, or on the viewer.