Secrets of the Code

The Press Room

Secrets of the Code
Feature Film Documentary Exploring The Da Vinci Code
Scheduled for “Sneak-Peak” at Tribeca Film Festival

New York, April 26, 2006—While everyone waits for the much-discussed worldwide premier of The Da Vinci Code May 19, audiences will get their first look at a very different film that explores many of the same issues tonight, when a “sneak-peak” session of the independent film documentary, Secrets of the Code, is featured as a special event at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival (6:30 PM, Tribeca Cinema 1). Following the showing of highlights from the film as a work-in-progress, there will be a Q and A session with the film’s director, Jonathan Stack, who will be joined by author Dan Burstein, editor of the New York Times bestselling book, Secrets of the Code, which has just appeared in a new, updated paperback edition with a first print run of 500,000 from CDS Books/The Perseus Books Group.

“Just as our book, Secrets of the Code, provided readers with an intellectual journey into the multitude of issues alluded to in The Da Vinci Code, the Secrets of the Code film experience is its own unique emotional, visual, and intellectually thought-provoking journey into this world of alternative gospels, hidden messages, and secret and sacred knowledge,” says Dan Burstein, who is a producer of the Secrets of the Code film along with Donald Zuckerman and Brian Edelman.
Secrets of the Code, as directed by Jonathan Stack, emerges as a spiritual road-trip that explores the phenomenon of The Da Vinci Code from many new perspectives. From glimpses of the sacred feminine in a prehistoric cave in France, to musical mysteries hidden in a chapel in Scotland, and from a Templar tomb in London to the catacombs of Rome, the film takes the viewer on an intimate journey along the paths traveled by The Da Vinci Code novel. Along the way, teachers and writers, rabbis, monks, priests, and a variety of intriguing people whose lives have been affected by the novel, tell their stories, creating an evolving dialogue about the questions that have framed the search for meaning since the beginning of time.

“There are numerous reasons why The Da Vinci Code has been such a powerful novel and why, as a film, it may prove to be the biggest grossing movie of all time when it premiers next month,” observed Dan Burstein. “Obviously, the possible relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ explored in the novel, the role of women in the earliest days of Jesus’s movement, the controversy about secret societies like Opus Dei or the so-called Priory of Sion, the role of religion and the Catholic Church in the history of western civilization, intriguing ideas drawn from previously little-known early Christian writings, such as the Gnostic gospels and the recently-published ‘Gospel of Judas,’ new ways of looking at Leonardo da Vinci—all of these themes have fascinated readers.

“But the overarching issue, the one that ties all the other fascinations together, is the one that novelist Dan Brown alludes to throughout The Da Vinci Code in the persona of his fictional character, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon: the human desire to understand man/woman’s place in the universe and to create stories that become the basis for powerful myths, religions, and belief systems that seek to provide answers. Jonathan Stack’s interpretation of these issues turns Secrets of the Code into a film that is its own independent, entertaining, and thought-provoking meditation on the themes of The Da Vinci Code.”

In addition to the Tribeca Film Festival, Secrets of the Code will also be featured at the Hot Docs documentary festival in Toronto on May 1.