Vancouver Premiere at The Columbia, Saturday November 11! Feat. Q&A with director Will Lockhart after the film.
Date/Time: Nov 11 2017, 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm
New Westminster, The Columbia | Event calendarCost: by donation
Find tickets: here
"The rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go." - Edward Lasker, Chess Grandmaster
SYNOPSIS
The ancient game of Go is the most complex and elegant game ever discovered. Though the rules are simple enough to teach a child, the complexity that emerges has inspired millennia of study. For three thousand years, master players in East Asia have handed down the game as an art form to foster patience, creativity, and self-reflection. Today in the elite world of the pros, international tournaments offer hundred-thousand dollar prize purses, and top matches are broadcast on 24-hour "Go TV" to millions of fans in China, Korea, and Japan. But in the West, most people have never even heard of the game… until now.
THE SURROUNDING GAME follows the lives of three young Americans vying to become the first-ever Western professional players. Quirky, cerebral, and disillusioned with conventional views of success, they represent a new generation of players, on the doorstep of adulthood. As the competition intensifies and intricate patterns spill out across the board, the line between reality and imagination starts to blur. Their thoughts turn to anxieties about the future, and lead them on a journey through the game’s ancient past to ask what it means to live a meaningful life. Through an intimate portrait of these young players and interviews with the greatest Go masters of all time, the film explores the search for meaning that Go represents to its players, for whom the game is a distillation of consciousness itself.
project history
Directors Will Lockhart and Cole Pruitt are experienced Go players and co-founders of the American Collegiate Go Association. We began pre-production in Spring 2012, spurred by the launch of the first Western professional Go certification system slated for later that year. In June we launched a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter.com, and began following Ben, Andy, and Curtis as they advanced through the competition. With the support of many of the world's major Go organizations, including the Shanghai Ing Foundation, we filmed extensively in Japan, China, Korea, and the United States through 2013. Along the way we gained access to the preeminent Go institutions of East Asia, and captured the only Western interviews of many of the strongest players of all time.
The film debuted at the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs, CA, on April 3 2017.
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