The Muralist (Sengedorj Janchivdorj) Mongolia |

The Muralist
Sengedorj Janchivdorj
Mongolia. 2025. 116 min

Baya, a weather-worn muralist who spent his glory years in Europe, has drifted back to Ulaanbaatar with nothing but a rickety rooftop tent, a box of fading paints and Dolingor, the stray that shadows his every step. Each dawn he rappels down an abandoned Soviet-era factory wall, splashing mythic Mongolian landscapes across the crumbling concrete while a sardonic red balloon—equal parts conscience and comic Greek chorus—floats overhead.
When city officials announce the site will be bulldozed for a turkey farm, Baya digs in, certain this mural will be his life’s summa. His only allies are Tömö, a curious herder boy who’s never owned a crayon, and Kazu, a Japanese photo-journalist whose lens turns Baya’s anonymity into sudden global intrigue. Their fragile coalition clashes with bureaucrats and developers, but the deeper fight is inside Baya: a decades-old guilt over the wife and daughter he abandoned for art.
Drawing on surreal realism and long, breathing takes that keep us at the artist’s elbow, director J. Sengedorj weaves Mongolia’s gritty urban present with its shamanic inner world. The Muralist becomes a hymn to imagination’s stubborn survival—whether in spray-painted saints, a boy’s first charcoal line, or the quiet forgiveness that can still bloom on a ruined wall.

SENGEDORJ JANCHIRVDORJ

Sengedorj Janchivdorj (1976) is a Mongolian filmmaker who studied directing at the “Bers” College of Media and Cinematic Arts. From 2000 to 2003, he was the director of the Film Institute at the National Youth Theatre. After his debut a feature film in 1998, he directed a twenty-episode television series and several feature films. He is also a theatre director. Since 2018, he has been a board member of the Mongolian Film Industry Association. In 2023, his film “Sales Girl” won the Audience Award at the Tartu Love Film Festival Tartuff and in 2024 his “Silent City Driver” won the PÖFF Grand Prix.
Filmography
Life: Amidral (2018), I, the Sunshine (2019), Khudaldagch ohin (Müügitüdruk, 2021), Chimeegui khotiin jolooch (Vaikuse linna autojuht, PÖFF 2024), The Muralist (2025)

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DIRECTOR´S NOTE

The spark for The Muralist was a single, powerful image: a man painting a masterpiece on a wall slated for demolition. In Ulaanbaatar, a city where the nomadic soul strains against the concrete of its post-Soviet sprawl, this act of defiant creation felt both urgent and deeply Mongolian. Our protagonist, Bayaraa, lives in self-imposed exile—not only from his country but from his past. His monumental mural becomes his public confession, a final, desperate attempt to reclaim a history he chose to abandon.
Building on the cinematic language of my previous film, which won the Grand Prix at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, my approach is rooted in intimacy. We stay close to Bayaraa, using long, meditative
takes to immerse the audience in his solitude. The film’s visual texture merges gritty urban realism with poetic surrealism, where Bayaraa’s only confidante is a sardonic red balloon floating above him. But the core drama unfolds in the quiet, unnerving silences between a father and the young interpreter who, unknowingly, begins to dismantle the walls around his heart.
Ultimately, The Muralist questions what we fight to preserve when everything—our cities, our art, our memories—is ephemeral. The conflict is not merely about saving a wall from bulldozers, but whether a
connection can be rebuilt from the ruins of a broken promise. Through Bayaraa’s desperate, beautiful act, audiences witness the struggle to forge a future from a past that cannot be erased—a profoundly human
story that, while rooted in the unique tensions of modern Mongolia, speaks to any community grappling with the cost of progress.

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