The Faith Project - Urban Kora
2015 · 6m · Canada
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Toronto DJ and community organizer Sonam Tsering fits Buddhist practice into a crowded schedule of family-store shifts and volunteering. He recites mantras with prayer beads on the bus and visits the neighbourhood monastery when he can.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A six-minute portrait of a DJ reciting mantras on the TTC could've been a feel-good cliché about juggling spirituality and city life, but instead it just... sits with the contradiction without resolving it—no soundtrack swells, no epiphany, just a guy existing in two worlds at once.
The film's restraint places it squarely in the documentary tradition of intimate observation à la Wiseman or the Kartemquin school—its tender approach to spiritual practice in secular space recalls a lineage of films that let mundane ritual speak for itself.
The singular move here is trusting the mala beads as visual language: watch how the edit cuts between prayer and transit, letting the repetition of the beads become the film's actual structure rather than just a prop—that economy of means makes the whole thing breathe.