25/08/2026
Last year on my documentary travels in North East India, we came across intriguing gates that led into pure eerie fog. But sitting on top of the gates were two deers kneeling on either side of the Dharma wheel that we recognised.
A Bon monastery. The Indigenous religion of Tibet, drawing on shamanic and animalistic practice, healing rituals, relations with local deities of land, sky and water, ritual purification and cosmology. Bon can be glossed as ‘boundlessness,’ with the two deers and the Dharma wheel telling a story of timeless teachings where even the animals come in peace to listen.
The monk who greeted us, opened us inside his world with hospitality and warmness. He taught us all about the deities and his rituals and even led us to circumambulation (kora) around the sacred site. Contrastingly to Tibetan Buddhists, Bon monks circumambulate anticlockwise. Done in auspicious counts of 3, 13 or 108 circuits.
One of my favourite things about film is its power to access communities like this. It’s the curiosity of the camera that ignites the curiosity of the other. To gain access and be welcomed into this world so different from my own, but to eternalise these images into storytelling, where we can realise how other truths exist, to learn more how vast our world is but also how interconnected we are.
