Who am I without all this noise?
Hello! My name is Ella Manzheeva.
For almost twenty years I have been exploring my identity. I am Kalmyk. We are a small people living in the south of Russia. We came there four hundred years ago in search of a new life. There are very few of us, but we have a unique culture and, sadly, a deeply tragic history. All of this has left its mark on us, and on me in particular.
The will to survive and to preserve ourselves gave us a great capacity for reflection, and it also awakened in me the desire to capture the egregore of my people. I became the first Kalmyk film director. I was simply enchanted by my culture. Perhaps the only real talent behind everything I have done is curiosity. Sincere curiosity. What if my dying identity could be reflected in cinema?
This is how the idea of a Kalmyk film language was born, and the world learned of it in 2015, when my debut feature The Gulls premiered at the Berlinale.
Later I opened a foundation in Kalmykia that helped to build a community, because I dreamed that this phenomenon would stop being a personal achievement and become a movement.
For ten years I ran film schools for children. A great many children made films. I was looking for one or two talented authors who could carry this on and become my successors. Yes, all of it was for those two names: authors who would carry my culture and be able to give this mentality a visual form.
The experiment worked. New artists, painters, cinematographers, screenwriters and producers emerged. Most importantly, I raised two talented authors who are now studying film directing in Germany and in France.
Of course, at the time I could not have imagined that Kalmyk cinema would end up in exile and continue to grow in Europe. But the events of 2022 largely set this path.
I also opened four cinemas in Kalmykia, which are still running today. I wanted people to have the habit of going to the cinema by the time these children grew up, so that these authors would one day have a place to show their films.
Now I live in France. Fortunately, my profession lets me stay connected and accept the shifts in consciousness that new influences and circumstances bring. It has always been this way. I simply try to remind myself who I am and to keep, as far as I can, a living tradition.
A few years ago I decided to learn the Kalmyk long songs. My debut took place at documenta fifteen, within the programme of Saodat Ismailova. I performed eight long songs. In Kalmykia only four people can sing these songs.
The reason for this interest was a very simple thought. One day my daughter will marry, and by tradition the mother sings these songs at the moment the bride leaves her home. The thought of inviting a singer felt to me like a betrayal of a living tradition. So I decided to learn myself.
Later something completely unforeseen happened that changed my relationship to my own identity. It was the beginning of its dissolution.
I heard the sound of Mars, recorded and released online for anyone to listen to. And I understood that if I were on Mars singing my songs, no Martian would ever identify me as Kalmyk. Perhaps they would not even notice that I am a woman. I would simply be an Earthling. It blew my mind.
At that moment I may not yet have grasped how far this change would go, but ever since I have watched my attachment to the self-definition I was once so proud of fall away.
I did not love my culture any less. I kept singing. But it became personal. It stopped being the main subject of my expression.
This is how Hunter of Emptiness began.
I am Buddhist by birth. It has been part of me from the start. But even if I were not, I think I would still have come to this subject, because I have always been drawn to existential questions: to thinking about the ego and compassion, about the path of liberation.
Through my film about Geshe Wangyal I came into contact with the greatest teachers of our time, including His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.
No one taught me to meditate. But during the shoot so many emotions and selfish thoughts rose up that the only way to calm my mind was meditation.
Four months of shooting and then two years of editing taught me not to act but to let things happen. It was good practice, because the production was so ambitious that none of my human or social resources were enough to organise it. So I simply began to meditate.
Later all of this shaped my new direction: the study of emptiness as the ground from which everything appears. I began to explore it within a project I called Hunter of Emptiness.
My field of interest lies where Buddhist studies, neurophysiology and art meet.
It took me almost a year to allow myself not to become an expert in either science or religion. At some point I understood that this is simply a path. A path that will interest me endlessly.
Circumstances can be different, favourable or not. But I came to the thought that I am like Mount Bogdo, where I found myself while filming White Road: a sacred mountain that has no fixed quality, positive or negative. It is simply an immense energy, and when you touch it, it multiplies whatever you brought with you. If you came with fear, the fear grows. If you came with gratitude, it grows a thousandfold.
There are not many such places left in the world. I call them Pure Lands. In Mexico, in Altai, in Tibet.
I decided to touch these places to deepen my research. The first thing I want to begin with is the kora around the sacred Mount Kailash.
So I conceived this expedition, which will bring together scientists, teachers of Buddhist practice and artists, to create a synergy of energy and to feel a collective meditation in the form of the pilgrim’s movement.
It is a kind of ritual. A repeated action that, with every circle, frees you from everything contrived. And the main goal, if there is one, or if I try to put it into words, is to understand who I am without all this social noise. To feel fear, to invite it, to see myself beyond myself. To become like water. To become like air.
Buddhists say that the colour of water is beyond, like the colour of air. We can see this colour only through reflections. And I thought that a human being is also this beyond. And only our reflections, emotions, fears and forms can prove that it exists.
I used to think a lot about the pink air of Kalmykia. Now I want to feel this colour beyond. To feel this freedom. To learn to watch how the beyond itself changes under the influence of these projections.
It is beautiful, isn’t it?
Ella Manzheeva
Paris, 23 July 2026