Research Studio. Photo: C.Pleteshner (2022)

This made-in-Mongolia music video is a collaborative artistic expression of the philosophy and belief system of the people who made it. I think it reasonable to say that Zava Damdin (1976- ) is the auteur (lit. author) – a creative artist with a distinctive approach.

I experience Zava Bagsh’s film-making as being deeply personal and yet somehow unbounded by certain cinematic and narrative conventions. With this first cinematic production in collaboration with Bosgo Film‘s Director Gan Achir, he has established his unique directorial style and thematic focus. Zava Bagsh invited me to work with him on the English language subtitles for this film. How could I – why would I – decline such an invitation?

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Buddhist Symbolic Iconography

Some viewers may not fully understand what they are looking at in this video. As an introduction, I feel the most important thing to point out to those of you less familiar with Mongolian culture and its Buddhist symbolic iconography, is that adornment with a five skull crown represents the successful transmutation of the five vices — ignorance, attachment, anger, pride and jealousy to more wholesome, some would say virtuous aspects of mind. Whilst some common synonyms for transmutation include convert or transform, transmute implies the transformation into a higher element or thing (cf. Merriam-Webster). Here it is …

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Welcome to Mongolia!

And the extraordinary cultural life of artists there!

Refer to the INDEX for other articles that may be of interest.

© 2013-2024. CP in Mongolia. This post is licensed under the  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Documents linked from this page may be subject to other restrictions.   Posted: 19 June 2022. Last updated: 27 December 2023.