Blue Mountain. White Cloud
Short documentary | 2024 | 10’45” | Super 8 mm to HD/DCP | Color | Sound
Synopsis
There is a story circulating among Zen Buddhist monks about two types of monks. First ones are settled and spend all their life in a monastery, they are identified with the blue mountains, while others are like white clouds – constantly traveling from one place to another. In the film, the filmmaker and Won Bo Sunim, a Lithuanian woman who decided to go to South Korea more than 20 years ago and become a Zen monk, embark on a journey in the mountains of South Korea.
Director | Miglė Križinauskaitė-Bernotienė
Producer | Akvilė Žilionytė
Editor | Nurruzaman Khan
Sound Designer | Laurynas Kamarauskas
Composer | Migloko
Color Editor | Nojus Drąsutis
Main Cast | Won Bo Sunim
Produced by | ARTIŠOKAI
The film was produced with the funding of Lithuanian Film Centre.
Screanings
2025
Alchemy Film and Movong Image Festival
Inflamável Festival de Cinema Super 8
Short Circuit Hear Here screening
International Golden Saffron Documentary Film Festival
2024
Tramway Film Festival
ANALOGICA Film Festival
Festival international Signes de Nuit
Pori Film Festival
Torino Underground Cinefest
Review
The conventional documentary portrait is also destabilised in Miglė Križinauskaitė’s Blue Mountain. White Cloud, in which the filmmaker travels from her home in Lithuania to South Korea ostensibly to make a work about Won Bo Sunim, a Lithuanian woman who went to South Korea decades ago and became a Zen monk. From the outset, however, an existential unease occupies the filmmaker; in revealing her anxieties about life and family to Sunim, she constructs a conversation between them. What results is a work in which the roles of artist and subject are beautifully blurred, cinema acting as a quietly powerful means of self-reflection. – Ali Jonathan (Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival)