A punk-rocker-turned-Buddhist-priest in Japan has made a career out of helping suicidal people find reasons to live. This work has, though, increasingly come at the cost of his own health and family life, as he refuses to draw a line between his patients and himself. The Departure captures this priest at a crossroads, when a spiral of self-destruction leads him to confront the same question his patients ask him: what makes life worth living?

Lana Wilson (Director/Producer) is an Emmy-winning filmmaker based in New York. Her first film, After Tiller, went inside the lives of the four most-targeted abortion providers in the country, and was critically acclaimed for providing a moving and complex look at one of the most incendiary issues of our time. After Tiller premiered at Sundance in 2013, and was theatrically released by Oscilloscope in 50 U.S. cities. It was nationally broadcast on PBS’s POV, and recently won the 2015 Emmy Award for Best Documentary as well as numerous other awards and accolades. Recently, Wilson wrote and produced Jacked, an episode of the National Geographic Channel miniseries I Am Rebel, which was itself executive produced by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity). Wilson was previously the Film and Dance Curator for Performa, the New York biennial of new visual art performance, where she produced major performances by artists including Guy Maddin, Boris Charmatz, L’Encyclopédie de la Parole, Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido, Pete Drungle, and Eleanor Bauer. She also curated several film retrospectives, including Not Funny: Stand-Up Comedy and Visual Art, The Polyexpressive Symphony: Futurism on Film, and Dance After Choreography. Wilson holds a B.A. in Film Studies and Dance from Wesleyan University.