I saw "The Bowmakers," by director Ward Serrill and producer Rocky Freidman, as part of the 2019 Port Townsend Film Festival, back when Freidman still co-owned the Rose Theatre.

Even as one of 15 films I saw that weekend, "The Bowmakers" stood out to me for Serrill's deft interweaving of multiple nations' cultural histories, its detailed outlining of workmen's processes and its idiosyncratic first-person biographies.

So I shouldn't be surprised to find that same alchemy in Serrill's follow-up collaboration with Freidman, "Dancing with the Dead: Red Pine and the Art of Translation," a brisk yet contemplative 84-minute profile of Bill Porter, also of Port Townsend, who's translated the poems and teachings of historic Chinese Buddhists and Taoists under the pen name of "Red Pine."

The film's two-night premiere on Oct. 27 and 28, again held at Port Townsend's Rose Theatre, not only emulated "The Bowmakers" by taking advantage of a fascinating subject, but also drew surprising (and perhaps unintended) parallels between Porter, a Western autodidact of a scholar with a checkered past that's amusing and harrowing by turns, and Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha himself.

Like most traditional accounts of the Buddha, Porter was raised in a spiritually impoverished material privilege, and like many who suffer trauma at an early age, Porter sought out the simple pleasures of an untroubled existence for its own sake, to the point that he was relieved by the eventual dissolution of his family's wealth.

Porter's yearning for freedom from needless burdens and trite trappings was nonetheless complicated by the recurring practical obligations of his everyday life, from an admittedly less-than-distinguished stint in the military, to a largely misdirected course of higher education, which culminated in him following his discovery of Buddhism to its source in Eastern Asia.

Although Porter spent several years, over the decades that followed, as a virtual hermit in Chinese Buddhist monasteries, this ironically only seems to have sharpened his edge as a raconteur, because he holds forth with the confidence, eloquence and sharply honed comedic pitch of Richard Harris during any of his vintage appearances on "The Dick Cavett Show."

As entertaining as Porter's tales of his questionable escapades can be — the man made sure to balance out full days of studious, meditative translation with lively, social nights of celebration, and even turned to smuggling to prove to his future wife's parents that he could be a responsible provider for her — Serrill does more than merely cede the floor of his film to his subject.

Seattle's Drew Christie provides deceptively simplified animation sequences, whose distinctive and playful personalities mirror Porter's own, to compensate for the relative paucity of period photographs or film footage available from the man's past, while Redmond's Spring Cheng, who emigrated to America from China roughly 30 years ago, contributes her well-honed talent for furnishing musical accompaniments for historic Chinese poetry.

While Porter is hardly one of the "hobbits working in man-caves" whom Serrill profiled in "The Bowmakers," the translation of ancient texts lends itself even less to dynamically cinematic visuals than the craftsmanship of violin bows, so it's a testament to the filmmaking skills of Serrill, as well as the compelling experiences and insights of Porter, that "Dancing with the Dead" captivated my attention as effortlessly as the most pleasant meandering dinner-table conversations.

It's especially heartening to witness how the popularity of Porter's translation work among the Chinese people themselves led him to return to the Chinese countryside, this time accompanied by cameras, so he could make contact with China's modern Buddhist hermits, among whom his elevated fame had preceded him.

By the turn of the millennium, Porter was teaching Buddhism and Taoism to others, and the respect (and accordant consumer success) with which his scholarship and multimedia works have been met by the majority of Chinese people — including a TV scene devoted to discussing his books, on what Porter described as the Chinese equivalent of "Sex and the City" — has allowed him to achieve perhaps the most improbable of dreams for a career academic, as he finally managed to pay off all his financial debts, nearly a decade ago.

Broader distribution of "Dancing with the Dead" is still being worked out, but in the meantime, you can check out the showtimes at the Rose Theatre, at rosetheatre.com/film/dancing-with-the-dead online, while the website for the film itself can be found at redpinemovie.com online.