Abraxas

New York Premiere

Greeted with wild enthusiasm at the Sundance Film Festival, Abraxas is already earning comparisons to the movies of Ingmar Bergman, but we like to believe it’s bigger than that. This is enlightenment by electric guitar. Jonen (played by Suneohair, a real-life rock star in Japan) used to be a punk rocker, but now he’s a Zen Buddhist monk. Crippled by manic depression and the survivor of several suicide attempts, he’s adrift in his robe. He wants to be a good man but there’s a demon burning in his heart that he needs to set free. His road to nirvana, he realizes, isn’t leading him away from his punk rock past, but back to it.