18th DMZ International Documentary Film Festival2026.9.10—16

And the Moon Sets over the Temple That Was

2026 Cinéma du Réel - Competition

South Korea202571minDCPColor12

#Experimental #Nature·Ecosystem #History #Non-human #Travel

SYNOPSIS

The camera sets out on a journey to find the headless Buddha statues scattered across the Namsan Mountain in Gyeongju, South Korea. What has disappeared, who caused it to vanish, and how has it been recorded? People stroll along the river, the sea, and mountain paths, taking photographs, where images from the past and the desire for excavation overlap. (This film is screened with A Real Christmas.)

REVIEW

A hometown, the site of one’s origins and a source of perpetual nostalgia, is often imagined as a fossilized space-time. Perhaps this is the innocent hope of a diaspora that has left home behind. And the Moon Sets over the Temple That Was is an essay in which Justin Jinsoo Kim returns to his hometown of Gyeongju in search of headless Buddhist statues. Implanting the camera into these erased bodies and combining animation with 3D technology, he playfully constructs a new map of home.
Many Korean documentaries made after the December 3, 2024 insurrection have sought to capture people’s faces. The faces of politicians, activists, and citizens that dominated the news and public squares became political images emblematic of the era. Kim stands far from such an impulse. If Tsai Ming-liang’s Your Face (2018) elevated the human face into an ancient landscape layered with time—a Deleuzian crystal-image—Kim instead presents headless statues, bodies deprived of eyes, noses, mouths, ears, and even brains, and summons imagination into those absences. Standing within these openings, he overlays camera, animation, and a childlike imagination. What the film ultimately creates is not the old face of Gyeongju, but a future hometown approaching from afar.

DIRECTOR'S NOTE

The camera quietly observes the ruins and landscapes of everyday life, places that seem untouched by time. Yet, like stones being formed over time, or stones slowly stacked into a tower, it strives to gather the stories layered upon each other. Moving through Gyeongju, the film lingers on headless statues—figures whose missing heads have disappeared for reasons unknown, forgotten, or never recorded. And it moves ceaselessly between history and the personal, record and memory, past and present. A Buddha whose head has been replaced by a round stone, a headless statue standing solitary at a bus stop, rows of decapitated Buddhas lined up before a museum-around all of these scenes, countless people pass by, indifferent.

DIRECTOR

Justin Jinsoo KIM

Born in 1993, Justin Jinsoo Kim has directed eight works, including the feature-length film And the Moon Sets over the Temple That Was. His shorts Personality Test (2021), The Far and Near (2023), and A Real Christmas were presented at the New York Film Festival, while And the Moon Sets over the Temple That Was was screened at Cinéma du Réel.