Baekheung-am does not welcome cameras. The training hermitage for Buddhist nuns, tucked inside Eunhae-sa Temple, one of the Jogye Order's own district head temples, forbids photography and keeps its distance from the public by long-standing principle. When the documentary director Lee Chang-jae first asked to film there, he was refused. He asked again, and was refused again. By his own account it took four attempts before the hermitage finally agreed to let him in.
What he brought back, over roughly a year of filming, became On the Road, a portrait of four women moving through their formation as nuns: a woman who had abandoned a doctoral program, another left at the temple as an infant, each carrying a different route to the same discipline. Lee has said plainly that making the film changed him personally, that he became a Buddhist in the course of it, one of the more direct testimonies a documentarian has given about a subject reshaping the person behind the camera.
The film found an audience well beyond what a small independent Korean documentary usually draws, more than 50,000 viewers, a festival debut at Jeonju, an invitation to the Seoul Independent Film Festival, and the Butterfly Prize at the Cinema Digital Seoul Festival. The Jogye Order's own news pages carried word of it too, not as the Order's production but as a record, made by an outsider who had to earn his way in, of a life the Order's own hermitage otherwise keeps almost entirely out of view.