Selected for this series by Lee Yong-Kwan and added to the programme by Kim Ji-Seok, Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? seems at first sight an anomalous choice for this context. Whereas the other films in the series make a virtue of their rough-and-ready conditions of production, Bae′s film is a work of extreme aesthetic refinement, shot on 35mm and made with painstaking care. And yet like the other films here it was made entirely independently with the smallest possible crew; the director himself also wrote, photographed and edited the film. Framed as a retreat from (or alternative to) to the noise and pollution of present-day city life, the film offers its viewers not an explication of Zen Buddhism but a contemplative experience which may or may not serve as a step towards enlightenment. Using five main ′characters′ (three men of varying ages: an elderly monk, his disciple and an orphaned boy; and two animals: a jay and a cow) and a minimal narrative centred on reactions to physical death, rejection of the material world and links between buddhism and shamanism, Bae sets out to create a cinema of meditative poetry. (Tony Rayns)