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The Hindu
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Director Pawo Choyning Dorji interview: On Bhutanese modernity and echoes of Edward Yang in ‘The Monk and the Gun'
There's a poster of A Brighter Summer Day hanging in Pawo Choyning Dorji's home. It's a tribute to the late Edward Yang, but also something far more personal. 'The little girl in the film,' he tells me, 'Chang Chen's little sister... that little girl is my wife.' There's something almost sacred in the intimacy of this little aside during our conversation that caught me by surprise. And yet it seems quite fitting. The Taiwanese auteur's legacy of stillness, his emotional patience, and the manner in which he held memory and modernity in the same breath — all feel strikingly alive in Pawo's oeuvre of cinema. It's an inheritance Pawo carries with grace, if not intentionality. 'I never went to film school,' he says. 'I studied political science.' It was precisely this confluence — studying politics in the U.S. during the invasion of Iraq while watching his homeland, Bhutan, gently usher in a democratic transition — that sparked something deeper in him. 'American students would say, it is the duty of America to give democracy to people who don't have it... the gift of democracy,' he recalls. 'I was from a country where we were literally gifted democracy. But we didn't ask for it. We didn't fight for it. There was no revolution, no war, and yet we weren't necessarily ready for it. I don't even know if we're ready for it now.' That tension between the 'gift' and the cost, between imposed modernity and lived tradition, is the soul of The Monk and the Gun, Pawo's latest political satire. On paper, it's a farcical telling of a monk in Bhutan tasked with finding a gun during the country's first national election. But beneath the comedic conceit lies some crushing insight into how nations rich in an inner life, like Bhutan, have risked spiritual amnesia in their pursuit of 'prosperous' external systems. 'When I premiered the film in Bhutan,' Pawo says, 'people were crying. I never expected that. I thought I made a satire. But for Bhutanese audiences, it was something else. One person told me, 'This reminded us of how, in the pursuit of something we thought we needed, we lost something we already had.'' He continues, 'That's not something I would've learned in a political science class. That's something I only realised at the very end, once the audience showed me what the film really meant.' Though it's not just the political system of his homeland that Pawo interrogates. He's also reckoning with what modernity is doing to its spirit. 'If you come to Bhutan, the phallus is a very important part of our culture,' he says. 'We are a tantric Buddhist country, and everything has meaning.' In tantric thought, inhibition is the final barrier to enlightenment, and the solution seems to be more embarrassment. 'If you have water in your ears, a Bhutanese will say: put more water,' he laughs. 'You want to destroy inhibition? Put yourself in situations where you constantly feel it. You see a phallus, you feel embarrassed, you feel shy, but that's okay. Because actually, in the end, nothing exists.' Towards the end of the film, an American who arrived seeking a firearm leaves with a towering wooden phallus. 'The gun represents something foreign,' Pawo explains. 'Western, modern, but also a bringer of suffering. The phallus, on the other hand, is our tradition. This juxtaposition is no accident. Both are 'phallic, '' Pawo says with a half-smile. 'Both are masculine. But one represents fear, and the other represents freedom.' More regretfully, the one native to Bhutan is disappearing. 'Growing up, they were everywhere. But as we became more modern and Westernised, we began to feel embarrassed by them, and so they vanished. The very thing that was supposed to help us transcend inhibition became the source of it.' In Pawo's Bhutan, these symbols are never inert and ripple outward personally, politically, and metaphysically. Yet, the road to manifesting these stories onscreen is anything but seamless. The Bhutanese film industry, as he tells me, is nascent, bordering on non-existent. His Oscar-nominated 2019 debut, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, was shot with a single camera and no electricity. 'It was a solar-powered film,' he says, laughing. 'Even now, with more recognition, we still truck every piece of equipment in from Delhi.' Still, Bhutan offers Pawo something few other places could as a spiritual ground to stand on, even as his gaze grows more global. Recently, he contributed a segment to Tales of Taipei, a collaborative anthology film about life in the Taiwanese capital. 'In Bhutan, we roll out of bed at eight, make coffee, then discuss what to shoot that day. In Taiwan, the crew was on set at 3 or 4 in the morning. It was quite intense, but also very professional.' Still, Taiwan isn't foreign terrain for Pawo. His wife and children are Taiwanese and he calls it a second home. In fact, his entire aesthetic sits at a confluence of worlds: East and West, past and present, tradition and transformation. He cites Kore-eda for his realism, Tarantino for his audacity, and, most meaningfully, his own spiritual and creative mentor, Dzongsar Khyentse Norbu. 'He was the one who saw I was a storyteller before I knew it myself,' Pawo says. 'His films are deeper, more philosophical, and I once told him my films would be more cheesy in comparison. And he said, 'Well, if cheesy is done right, it works.'' Indeed, 'cheesy' might be the last word anyone would use to describe Pawo's films. His frames feel like paintings. His stories take their time. And his humour, like his politics, comes from deep within. Pawo tells me, 'You will never see your own eyelashes because they are so close to you' — something the Buddha once said. The thought felicitously explains why his films often turn inward, searching for what's been missed in plain sight. While the world rushes to look outward, to see farther, Pawo seems more preoccupied with what we've stopped noticing up close. Perhaps that's where the spirit of Edward Yang lingers most clearly in his films. In the tenderness to look at one's own culture, to question it without cruelty, and to hold its contradictions and absurdities with care. To see clearly. Even especially, when it's your own eyelashes in the way. The Monk and the Gun is currently available to stream on MUBI
Scroll.in
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Start the week with a film: Bhutan-set ‘The Monk and the Gun' is a charming comedy about modernity
Given everything that is going on in the world (Israel's carnage in Gaza, Russia's never-ending invasion of Ukraine, America's war on itself), the anti-violence message of The Monk and the Gun (2023) seems naive. But better that than cynical. Bhutanese director Pawo Choyning Dorji's film takes place against the backdrop of the Himalayan kingdom's first democratic election. A mock election is taking place to train citizens in democracy. They are instructed to choose between three fictitious parties. Blue symbolises freedom and equality. Red represents industrial development. Yellow preserves the status quo. Government officials earnestly get to work, but the people are sceptical. Look at our neighbour India – they are pulling each other's beards and throwing chairs at each other, one man observes. Meanwhile, an elderly monk asks his disciple to fetch him guns. The country is changing, the monk laments. The younger monk doesn't know even what a gun looks like. But he is bound to serve his master, and so he sets out to look for the weapons. In the third strand, an American turns up in Bhutan to buy an antique rifle. These intersecting stories provide a fascinating glimpse into a sheltered country's tentative steps towards an imported value system. The film is a charmer, folding into a cheeky satire about democracy a philosophical inquiry into the merits of Western modernity. Director Dorji, who has previously made Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, sprinkles wry humour, sly critique and Buddhist wisdom over his story. The observational drama features a mix of professional and non-professional actors. Democracy might promise equality for all, but it's flawed in several ways too. Already, the mock election is turning neighbour against neighbour. It's not right to pit candidates against one other, why are you teaching us rudeness, a granny wants to know. To be democratic is to be modern, one of the electoral officers says. But what is progress if it represents instruments of death, chewing gum and American films on television? The gentle satire is available on MUBI. The Monk and the Gun has lovely performances, a playful tone and a judicious pace that allow viewers to feast on Bhutan's unending beauty. Like Khyentse Norbu's The Cup (1999), The Monk and the Gun seeks a middle ground between East and West, the comforts of tradition with the knowledge that change cannot be put off forever. The extended climax is idealistic but convincing too. The meshing of ancient wisdom with a current understanding of how guns ruin civilisations is exactly the kind of simplistic but basic truth that the world needs at the moment. Play
Indian Express
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
What to watch on OTT: Vir Das: Fool Volume, The Monk and the Gun, Rematch and more
What to watch on OTT: Vir Das is back with a new Netflix special and the final season of The Summer I Turned Pretty, here's you watch list for this weekend. Vir Das: Fool Volume Netflix Vir Das's brand-new special, Vir Das: Fool Volume, is filmed across Mumbai, New Delhi and London. With his signature cocktail of wit, wisdom, and total nonsense, he's here to remind us: in a world that takes itself too seriously, maybe being the fool is the smartest move. Reflecting on the journey behind his most personal special yet, Vir shares, 'This is a show rewritten in silence and performed without rehearsal across the world. Turns out the voice in your head is way crazier than the one in your throat.' This marks Vir's fifth Netflix special. The Monk and the Gun Directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji, The Monk and the Gun is a playful ensemble drama that explores the clash between embracing modernity while holding on to the past. Set in 2006, as the Kingdom of Bhutan was at the brink of transition to democracy, the film premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. 'As the Kingdom of Bhutan is to become a democracy, a mock election is held as a training exercise. In the town of Ura, an old lama orders a monk to get a gun to face the imminent change in the kingdom. Meanwhile, an American collector is in search of a valuable gun that falls in the lama's hands,' reads its synopsis on MUBI. Dorji earlier directed the 2019 Academy Award-nominated Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom. Untamed Netflix This limited series is a character-driven mystery thriller that follows Kyle Turner (Eric Bana), a special agent in an elite branch of the National Parks Service who works to enforce human law in nature's vast wilderness. The investigation of a brutal death sends Turner on a collision course with the dark secrets within the park, and in his own past. Created by Mark L. Smith (American Primeval, The Revenant) and Elle Smith (The Marsh King's Daughter), the mystery thriller follows a murder on the grounds of Yosemite. 'Everyone thinks of Yosemite as this beautiful place with all the vistas and all the scenery, but we were trying to touch on the dangers that are just beyond that,' co-showrunner Mark L. Smith tells Tudum. The Summer I Turned Pretty S3 Prime Video It's the end of the junior year of college, and Belly (Lola Tung) is looking forward to another summer in Cousins with her soulmate, Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno). Her future seems set, until some core-shaking events bring her first love Conrad (Christopher Briney) back into her life. Now on the brink of adulthood, Belly finds herself at a crossroads and must decide which brother has her heart. Based on the best-selling book trilogy from Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty is a multigenerational drama centered around a love triangle involving one girl and two brothers. The series premiered with the first two episodes on July 16, followed by weekly releases every Thursday until September 17. Rematch Lionsgate Play In 1997, the unthinkable happened: a supercomputer beat the greatest chess mind alive. Rematch recreates the historic showdown between world champion Garry Kasparov and IBM's pioneering supercomputer Deep Blue, in a gripping psychological drama that explores the limits of human intellect in an age of rising machines. This six-episode miniseries is directed by Yan England and stars Christian Cooke as Kasparov.
