THE MIDDLE WAY

During a discussion around Zen with some of my students - practice what I teach for twenty years in my own school of Wu Dao - a friend of one of them, no practicer, turns to me and asks me directly: what is Zen?

I could have given him the famous reply of the great Master Zen Dongschan:
"It is the cypress in the courtyard", or in a most modern language : it is an old and traditional method of destabilizing the conscious in favor of the unconscious, but suddenly I feel in the place of someone who must describe the colors to a blindman or the taste of sugar to someone who has never eaten it. This feeling was the starting point of this story.

The Middle Way is for me an attempt to make live emotionally the experience of Zen to the audience, like the traditional tales : Cham for China or Zen
for Japan.
In this sense, The Middle Way is not a Martial Arts film - even if it exploits imagery and codes.
It is an author film with its artistic and philosophical point of view; Its personal way of making images: with its own rhythm, its own aesthetic, its own grammar.

Simplicity being the characteristic of Zen, everything in the film will go in the direction of this simplicity: direction, light, decor, costumes, sound and music.
The picture will be very worked, very refined, with frames composed like paintings, very contrasted light, with many chiaroscuro.

We will be very close to the actors to feel their interiority, the breath and the emotions that animate their gaze.
They are the same actors who have been working on my films for a decade.

The Middle Way is a comedy, a story full of malice and humor. It will be shot in French language to accentuate its shifted aspect.