GYÜTÖ

SYNOPSIS

To hear the sound of the ocean in the Himalayas… This unlikely wish takes a film director and her three girls to GYÜTÖ, where a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, perched high, echoes day and night the sound of sacred tantric chants of meditation, «which sound like the waves of the ocean».

Wandering freely about wherever their curiosity leads them, they discover the daily life of 400 monks living there.Over time, a dialogue develops and a growing complicity emerges.From this intimate immersion, a film takes form, unfolding like a wave both visually and in sound. The reality of Buddhism is revealed in a way that is unprecedented, in the spontaneity of the questions asked, as well as with the sensitive understanding of a child’s point of view and with no proselytisation at all.

DIRECTOR’S BIO

Filipa Cardoso was born in Lisbon in 1971. At the age of 18, Filipa Cardoso left her roots to go to France to study dance. She travelled the world as a dancer and discovered a passion for photography. When she moved to Brussels, she developed her passion for images by making her first films, initially devoted to the world of theatre, dance and music, then by co-directing documentaries, notably on the filmmaker Satyajit Ray in India.

Since then, Filipa Cardoso has been constantly broadening her experience, working on all the stages of filmmaking, from shooting to final editing.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

In today’s world, learning techniques that imply slow maturation and transformation, are unheard of. Convinced that we have no time, we live henceforth by proxy, identifying ourselves to dreamed-up lives and in a rush to fulfill our desires at once. With this film, I wanted to slow time down for the duration of an experience in total immersion in GYÜTÖ, where the monks seem to ‘hasten’ slowly. Wanting to observe, at the source, their very particular way of life, between tradition and modernity, the monastery is also a big university for the development of rigorous intellect, and they live there, their spirituality in phase with the world today.

I allow myself to wander about with nothing holding me back, as much by distraction as by curiosity, swept by this red tide of men. People, objects that I encounter, irrupt before me on this journey; a journey, which is that of a wanderer. Wandering isn’t just any form of laziness or aimlessness; it is both carefreeness and attention, abandonment and alertness. My approach follows this kind of method and calls for the same vision.

The halts in my steps open up to momentary allurements to a story or a tale. Nothing more than the capture of a fleeting moment, the wish to hold on to what’s already vanishing, to demonstrate my assent to all that occurs, to all that simply is. As a woman director walking around in this masculine world, never did I feel at any moment unease or unrest, as if the issue of gender didn’t have its place here, because we were present there solely as beings. And I want to reach the viewers in their condition as human beings.

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Filipa Cardoso
filipabe@gmail.com