When, in India, Bhutan’s first Oscar-nominated director decided to become a storyteller

Competing within the Worldwide Characteristic Movie class, with Drive My Automobile (Japan), Flee (Denmark), The Hand of God (Italy), and The Worst Individual within the World (Norway), Lunana… is a narrative of resilience. Submitted for final yr’s version, it was disqualified, as a result of the Academy didn’t recognise Bhutan’s nationwide movie committee, which hadn’t submitted a movie in so lengthy. This time round, when he was submitting the movie, Bhutan/Bhutanese didn’t function within the nation/language lists on the Academy’s web site. The clock was ticking, there was a lot to-and-fro, and after the Academy up to date the web site, twice, the movie charted its personal karma. It had reached this stage minus the Oscar foyer channel. Getting nominated was not his intention, not even a wild dream. “I needed to submit it as a result of in this type of world, Bhutan is irrelevant. I simply needed to point out that Bhutan has a spot,” says Taiwan-based Dorji, 38. The movie has received a string of awards, together with an viewers award (narrative function) on the 2020 Palm Springs Worldwide Movie Pageant, the place Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2020 Oscar winner) had obtained the Fipresci screenplay prize.

Director Pawo Choyning Dorji and Pem Zam (Credit score: Tshering Dorji)

Lunana… pits modern actuality towards historical knowledge. It opens with a juxtaposition, a foreshadowing. Within the excessive mountains, a girl sings Yak lebi lhadar, a yak music of separation and sacrifice, sung as an providing, as a grandmother within the metropolis tries to get up her grandson Ugyen, who’s sporting a “Gross Nationwide Happiness” tee, from his slumber, literal and metaphorical. However actual awakening will want him to embark on a journey, inwards, into the self and his nation. The desires of each the reel Ugyen, and the real-life singer Sherab Dorji, who performs the character, lie within the West, in faraway Australia. Within the movie, the varsity trainer awaits his visa as he sings Creedence Clearwater Revival in pubs. He’s despatched to Lunana, excessive up amid snow peaks, one of many remotest corners on the planet, to finish his ultimate yr of the federal government’s five-year instructing mandate. There, his college students, together with the electrical Pem Zam — repeat after him Hindi-sounding singsong Dzongkha alphabets, desirous to stay completely different lives, be extra than simply yak herders or cordyceps farmers — inform him: “a trainer can contact the long run”.

Pem Zam (left) and one other lady in school

The lens motion, as he makes his ascent up the mountains, parallels Ugyen’s religious journey. If the hand-held, preliminary photographs are jerky and tight, to replicate “he’s misplaced, not sure of himself, what he needs, the place he belongs”, it stabilises on the prime. The primary time the digicam goes extensive, and we see Lunana, is when the snow mountains come into sight, because the characters speak concerning the snow lion’s disappearance. The hand-held digicam stabilises, on a tripod, solely when Ugyen agrees to be the trainer the village has been ready for.

Lunana… is shot on solar-powered batteries in a documentary function type, with non-actors and villagers who’d by no means seen a movie earlier than. For them, the digicam might properly be a yak, which performs a key function within the film. The classroom, symbolically, is defending the yak, which signify purity, endurance, braveness, perseverance, generosity and historical knowledge: elements trainer Ugyen can be taught from. “I informed the locals I desire a yak within the classroom, they’d by no means heard of this, yaks are usually not cows, are semi-wild. We needed to break down the category wall to suit Naka (referred to as Norbu within the movie), the star of the movie, a most mild, and cooperative yak, as a result of he was previous and half-blind. He handed away after the movie’s completion however lives on in it”.

Director Pawo Choyning Dorji with yak dung in Lunana. (Photograph: Jigme Thinley)

A Bhutanese fable, Lunana… is harking back to Rabindranath Tagore’s story The Postmaster. It tells a common story and its magic is that “inside its simplicity, it celebrates a common human high quality, of in search of that the place you belong, in search of house”. Dorji takes his movie’s protagonist, and himself, on this inside journey to drive house the purpose that happiness just isn’t elsewhere, it’s in being content material. With nice restraint, the director ensures that this candy pang of a movie hits the place it hurts essentially the most, it makes us really feel, however by no means devolves into sentimentalisation, its catharsis lie in not the apparent, however within the sincere. Dorji usually will get informed he “have to be a really blissful man”, for Bhutan banks on Gross Nationwide Happiness. He says, “In Lunana…, I’m attempting to replicate what Bhutan goes via, the massive migration of the youth, of the academics, to the glitz and attract of the West, to locations like Australia. I’ve heard Perth and Sydney has round 4,000-5,000 Bhutanese, now that is likely to be too little in India’s case, however for a rustic of solely seven lakhs, that’s lots of people. The No.1 job dropping staff in Bhutan is instructing, however I’m not telling them, hey, don’t go, there’s a lot magnificence right here. I’m saying, go chase your desires, however sing your personal songs wherever you might be’.”

Born in Darjeeling, the place his diplomat father had moved from Bhutan, Dorji studied in Kodaikanal and would return, in his grownup years, to Dharamsala, at a Buddhist monastery, to change into a monk, underneath the tutelage of Norbu. Along with his multinational, multi-cultural upbringing, Dorji — who’s lived in India, Bhutan, Switzerland, the US, Center East, and now divides his time between Taiwan, Bhutan and India — too, had frowned upon Bhutan’s previous, custom, tradition as backward, however was “blown away” by his encounters — a father’s cracked, calloused naked ft in icy Bumthang valley, subsequent to his toddler in rain boots; unbeknownst of world warming, a yak herder hyperlinks melting snow peaks with Bhutan’s animals: the legendary snow lion, dragon, Garuda, the actual tiger, as symbols of the enlightened thoughts/coronary heart, now disappearing owing to “greed, human overconsumption”. The movie echoes these tales.

A nonetheless from the movie

“We have been the final nation on the planet to connect with tv and to the web. As a rustic, we have been in self-isolation, to protect and shield our tradition, our id. I used to be 13 when TV arrived in Bhutan. It turned a standing image. Cows and yaks have been bought to purchase TVs, that have been stored in shrines at houses, and supplied flowers and incense. It gave a glimpse of the surface world, past the mountains of Bhutan, to the locals, who needed to sing, gown and be just like the ‘foreigners’. It shook the very basis of a ‘sense of contentment’,” says Dorji.

Whereas Bhutan’s three-decade-old home movie trade thrives on Romeo-Juliet and Bollywood-inspired, song-dance tales, in vibrant costumes, the place some administrators would even churn out 4 movies in a month. However it’s so small that unbiased filmmakers didn’t dare think about they may make movies of a global degree, till Norbu’s The Cup, and Travellers and Magicians (2003). Norbu “is the explanation why I turned a filmmaker,” says Dorji. Norbu took him underneath his wings, taught him the commerce’s tips, and the way to inform tales outfitted with a digicam. He made Dorji his assistant on Vara: A Blessing (2013), that includes Bollywood actor Shahana Goswami and Bharatanatyam dancer Geeta Chandran, and a producer on his Tony Leung-starrer Hema Hema: Sing Me a Tune Whereas I Wait (2016), whose tools and crew (digicam, gentle, and sound groups) went from India. “There’s additionally this development. A variety of the Indians who got here in, helped prepare the Bhutanese, and for Lunana…, the one one that got here from India was our soundman (Delhi-based American Dave Stevens, who’d take away flapping prayer flags, to manage wind disturbances whereas recording, even put a recorder in recent yak dung to seize as a lot he might; the au naturel sound is designed by the veteran Duu-Chih Tu, who’s labored with Asian filmmakers Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Wong Kar-wai, Tsai Ming-liang, and many others.). For my subsequent movie, I’m seeking to get gear and assist workers from India.” In Himachal Pradesh, Norbu informed Dorji, “on this world, it’s very superb to be a monk, however you’ll be able to profit much more beings if you happen to’re a lay particular person. Think about if you happen to had the knowledge and compassion that was taught by the Buddha, however you aren’t confined by the vows and the robes, what if you happen to could possibly be a Buddhist president, a Buddhist lawyer, a Buddhist filmmaker, a Buddhist storyteller?” “It impressed me to remain on the Buddhist path and inform tales. In my language, once we say inform me a narrative, we are saying ‘untie a knot for me’. The act of telling a narrative has a liberating goal, to guide us to a better place,” says photographer-writer Dorji, who was engaged on a five-year picture venture to hint the Seventh-century Chinese language monk Hiuen-Tsang’s 18-year Silk Street journey from China to India, earlier than he met Norbu. “I’m at all times grateful to India. India is a big a part of my coronary heart and my life. My religious path is due to India. India gave the world Buddhism. Dwelling in India is the place I actually determined to change into a storyteller,” he says.

A working nonetheless from the units of Lunana: A Yak within the Classroom

The love for tales took Dorji to Lunana (darkish valley in Dzongkha), at 4,800m, with 56 inhabitants, reached after an eight-day trek, the place even electrical energy hadn’t arrived. “We had one digicam, no lights, not sufficient solar to energy batteries to look at dailies (Dorji might see what he’d shot two months later), we ate dried greens, pungent, dried meat hanging in our host’s kitchen. We’d make hearth with yak dung, might bathe solely as soon as in two months, couldn’t make cellphone calls or verify social media, the crew stored falling sick… it will get to you, however the journey exhibits you shouldn’t hand over, that if you happen to consider in your story, it is best to do every part to share it with the world,” says Dorji who was conflicted about rendering the folks and the valley of Lunana weak to outdoors forces.

However change is inevitable. On the final day of the shoot, as Dorji was packing as much as go away Lunana, a bunch of presidency officers arrived to put in telecom towers. Dorji just lately obtained a Fb message and TikTok dance video from Pem Zam, the movie’s pivot, now 12. “As filmmakers, we should inform the story of our time, our tradition, our folks. I’ve tried to serve Lunana… as a reference for future Bhutanese, of what Bhutan was going via of their previous, the migrations, and what Lunana was like earlier than the roads and phone arrived, earlier than the tales and songs, the purity and innocence, have been misplaced,” says Dorji.