Open Your Eyes

2015, USA, Irene Taylor Brodsky, 34 min.

Living under the Himalayan sun, Manisara and Durga’s eyes have slowly gone milky white. They have cataracts and their mountain home in Nepal has become a warren of darkness. Filmed over three days, the HBO Documentary Film Open Your Eyes follows their life-changing journey to see again. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Irene Taylor Brodsky, producer Larry Brilliant, and Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman.

About the Speakers

Irene Taylor Brodsky is an Oscar^®-nominated, Emmy^®– and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker whose documentaries have shown theatrically, at film festivals and on television worldwide. Open Your Eyes is one of Brodsky’s latest films, which she also shot and edited. She moved to Kathmandu in 1991, learned Nepali, and for several years documented the lives of the disabled in the Himalayas, including the blind. Additional credits include her most recent film Beware the Slenderman, One Last Hug: Three Days at Grief Camp, Saving Pelican 895, The Final Inch, and Hear and Now. She founded Vermillion Pictures in 2004.

Larry Brilliant is a physician, epidemiologist, philanthropist, innovator, and entrepreneur who has led foundations and public companies and has worked on several films, mostly attuned to his philanthropic interests. Brilliant is currently the Chairman of the Skoll Global Threats Fund and was previously Executive Director of Google.org. He was a WHO medical officer for more than a decade in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh working to eradicate smallpox, polio, and needless blindness. He is a co-founder of the Seva Foundation, which has given sight back to four million blind individuals—two of whom are featured in Open Your Eyes.

Robert A. F. Thurman is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University; President of the Tibet House U. S., a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization; and President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a non-profit affiliated with the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and dedicated to the publication of translations of important artistic and scientific treatises from the Tibetan Tengyur. The New York Times recently said Thurman “is considered the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism.”

Co-Presented with HBO