"Dancing With the Dead" shares a Northwesterner's unlikely path

Bill Porter went in search of a lost tradition. What he found made him a significant figure in contemporary Chinese culture, igniting a movement in modern China to seek enlightenment through poetry and mountain solitude.

Northwest filmmaker Ward Serrill (The Heart of the Game; The Bowmakers) presents DANCING WITH THE DEAD: Red Pine and the Art of Translation, a new documentary telling the surprising and singular story of Port Townsend’s Bill Porter. The film will screen one day only on Sunday, April 21st at SIFF Cinema Egyptian.

Porter, who goes by the pen name Red Pine, is a renowned translator of ancient Chinese poetry. He has published over thirty books, including Road to Heaven, his quest to rediscover the tradition of hermit sages who enter the mountains to attain enlightenment. In China, he has attained near cult status as a Westerner who has made a significant contribution to Chinese culture.

The film follows Bill’s adventures as a child of a bank robber, raised in a gilded household, who turned his back on American devotion to materialism and went off to live in monasteries and mountains in Taiwan. He pursued a fascination with Buddhism and poetry and traveled to remote regions of China to find and strengthen an ancient tradition of poetry and mountain solitude increasingly vital to Chinese society today.

“Inside China, he’s a source of endless fascination, because here’s a Westerner who really gets it, who really understands China, who clearly loves Chinese culture, who’s devoted his life to it.”
—Ian Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Ward Serrill and Red Pine, as well as a performance by singer Spring Cheng, and a conversation with Red Pine, moderated by Shin Yu Pai, Civic Poet of Seattle. A book signing by Red Pine will close out the event.