Crows Are White (2022) Review: Enlightenment With Ice Cream

Is Crows Are White worth watching?

Yes. Crows Are White is a wry, surprisingly moving documentary that sets out to film a secretive monastery and ends up as a searching portrait of its own director. Ahsen Nadeem’s great asset is his willingness to look foolish on camera, and his friendship with a monk who loves heavy metal and ice cream gives the film an easy, unforced comedy. The reservation is that the balance between the monks and the filmmaker’s personal story tilts towards the latter, which will frustrate anyone hoping for a straight look inside Buddhist monastic life.

What is Crows Are White about?

Nadeem travels to Japan hoping to document a reclusive Buddhist order known for its severe discipline. The monks have little interest in being filmed, and he is effectively shut out. What he finds instead is Ryushin, a monk who seems far more relaxed about the rules than his superiors, and whose tastes run to loud music and sweets rather than silent meditation.

As the two become friends, the camera slowly turns around. Nadeem has been hiding a double life of his own for years, and the questions he wanted to ask the monks about devotion, sacrifice and truthfulness become questions he has to ask himself.

Crows Are White is an American documentary, mostly in English, that runs 98 minutes. Nadeem directs and appears throughout. The film won Best Feature Documentary at the Balinale festival in 2023.

A documentary that changes its subject

The film’s structure is its cleverest move. It begins as a fairly conventional quest, with Nadeem narrating his ambitions and his failures to gain access, and it could easily have ended as a charming shaggy-dog story about a project that did not happen. Instead, the setbacks become the story. Each closed door pushes the film away from the monastery and towards the filmmaker, until the personal material carries the emotional weight.

That shift works because Nadeem is honest about his own motives. He does not present himself as a neutral observer or a spiritual seeker with pure intentions, and the film is at its sharpest when it notices the gap between the discipline he admires in the monks and the evasions in his own life.

Ryushin steals the film

Ryushin is the reason many viewers will remember Crows Are White. He is funny, frank and unexpectedly wise, a monk who treats his vocation seriously without treating himself seriously at all. His scenes with Nadeem have the rhythm of a buddy comedy, full of teasing and small misunderstandings, and they puncture any solemn ideas about what a holy life should look like.

The comedy is not at the monks’ expense. The film allows for the possibility that Ryushin’s easygoing faith is as real as the rigour of the stricter figures around him, and that tension between discipline and humanity is the documentary’s quiet thesis.

Where the balance slips

The two halves of the film do not always sit comfortably together. The monastery material is observational and light on its feet, while the personal reckoning is heavier and would benefit from more space than the running time allows, so viewers may feel they are asked to invest in a private story without quite being given enough of it. The film’s looseness, part of its charm, also means a few passages drift. At 98 minutes these are minor complaints, but they keep it just short of the top rank.

Who should watch Crows Are White?

It suits viewers who enjoy personal, essay-style documentaries, anyone curious about religious life and the compromises people make with their faith, and those who like their spiritual stories with a sense of humour. It is gentle viewing, with no violence to speak of, though its themes of family, secrecy and belief carry real emotional weight.

Two documentaries that pair well with it:

• Porcelain War, another film in which the people behind the camera are also central to what is in front of it.
• Champions of the Golden Valley, for a different story of friendship and purpose found somewhere few outsiders reach.

The verdict

Crows Are White is a disarming, often very funny documentary that turns a failed access story into an honest reckoning with faith and deception. The personal strand could use more room, but Ryushin’s warmth and Nadeem’s candour make it a small film that lingers.

Rating: 4/5