At a recent overseas feedback screening session held by Mirage Mountain studio, director Jinglu Ji unveiled her upcoming film “Travellers Vajra“, still in post-production. This highly anticipated work, with its unique narrative perspective and profound philosophical reflections, showcases the increasingly mature auteur style of this emerging female filmmaker.
The film uses a journey to Nepal to perform Buddhist rites for a deceased cat as its narrative vehicle, constructing a philosophical realm centered on emotion, death, and rebirth. Blending magical realism with the road movie genre, “Travellers Vajra” employs a nonlinear structure and meditative visual language to reveal Eastern culture’s deep insights into the essence of life. The director does not settle for superficial depictions of exotic cultures but instead uses the act of “holding a funeral for a cat” to probe the modern soul’s ultimate questions about impermanence, loss, and redemption.
The film’s core motif—cordyceps—transcends traditional causal logic, becoming a key element in subverting the anthropocentric perspective. The protagonist, Yuanyuan, travels from Beijing to Nepal to perform rites for her deceased cat while also intending to break up with her boyfriend, Decheng, who runs a cordyceps business there with a young monk. Cordyceps, these peculiar organisms that are neither animal nor plant, are depicted in the film as capable of speech and perception. They even “possess” human characters through dreams, trade, and physical invasion, eventually reincarnating as a cat. In this setup, cordyceps transform from mere commodities into “agents of action,” their fungal threads weaving an invisible yet powerful web of causality that entangles all the characters’ fates. This network structure visually embodies the Buddhist concept of “collective karma.” Through surreal imagery, the director materializes “entanglement,” making the “law of causality” visible and tangible. Every seemingly independent choice and action reverberates within this web—as Buddhism teaches, all phenomena arise from interdependent causes, with no inherent nature of their own.
The film’s spatial organization also reflects the director’s skillful fusion of visual language and philosophical meaning. The hotel elevator, an ordinary vertical transport, is endowed with the function of folding and traversing time and space. Its opening and closing connect not only different geographical locations but also the boundaries between life, death, and reincarnation. Each time the elevator doors shut and reopen, it is like entering the transitional phase of the antarābhava (intermediate state), ushering characters into new stages of existence—an innovative metaphor for rebirth in contemporary cinema.
Notably, the natural landscapes and surreal imagery in “Travellers Vajra” are not mere formal spectacles but visual translations of philosophical concepts. Mist-shrouded mountains, shadowy paths, and noisy villages—these seemingly concrete spaces, under the camera’s fluid movement, appear in a state of constant flux and detachment. They are not stable settings but projections of a consciousness adrift. As the audience follows Yuanyuan and Rinchen’s perspectives, they too gradually enter an experiential state beyond conventional perception, participating in the film’s constructed “Zen space.”
This film does not focus on Nepal’s exotic allure, nor does it indulge in a voyeuristic cultural tour. What it touches upon is a profound introspection into the contemporary soul’s condition—we are all possessed by cordyceps, each completing our own practice and awakening within the endless web of causality.
