Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?
is not the sort of movie that most people would break down the doors to see, I imagine. It has no gunplay, no Oscar-bid acting, no explosions, no CGI, no rubber monsters, no Ahnuld or Stallone or Jackie Chan or any other Hollywood actors for that matter, and exactly one drop of blood. It is, however, one of the most haunting and subtly powerful movies I have ever seen. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. Yong-Kyun, the director, is a professor of visual arts in Korea, and nominally not a filmmaker. With one camera and a few non-professional actors (everyone in the film is more or less playing themselves), he spent five years making this film in South Korea’s mountains. It seems like it was made frame-by-frame — there is a level of meticulousness and care in every single shot that isn’t present in most other movies. No shot is wasted — everything is included for a reason, and the shots are often held in such a way that we stop just looking at what we’re seeing and are encouraged to med
