The inaugural World Culture Film Festival in Los Angeles has found itself impacted by a dangerous storm half a world away.
Typhoon Gaemi, with top winds speeds equaling a category 3 hurricane, lashed the Philippines and Taiwan before blowing into China Thursday night. It caused widespread travel disruptions all the way west into Bhutan, where filmmaker Pawo Choyning Dorji had been attempting to get a flight to Los Angeles for the opening night of WCFF, a new event that describes itself as a platform for “entertainment that uplifts.”
The festival went ahead with the screening of Dorji’s Oscar-shortlisted dramedy The Monk and the Gun, but instead of being on the ground in L.A., the director participated in a Q&A via Zoom.
“I was trying to be there in person, but there was a big typhoon that disrupted all my plans,” Dorji explained to the audience at the Ray Stark theater on the USC campus. “So I’m coming to you guys live from Bhutan.”
The film takes place in 2006 when Bhutan’s king announced he would voluntarily step down to allow the country to transition from monarchical rule to democracy. The populace, unfamiliar with the concepts of voting or political parties, went through a process of training so that they could choose leaders who reflected their views.
“Whatever you saw in this film, it’s all true events,” Dorji said.
A Bhutanese lama living in a remote area recognizes the impending changes as momentous and tasks a young monk with obtaining a gun before the next full moon. It’s unclear whether the lama wants the weapon to serve some violent plan, in opposition to the political transformation, or whether he intends it for some other purpose.
Bhutanese culture, deeply consonant with Vajrayana Buddhist teachings, values a completely different way of seeing life from what prevails in so much of the globe. The Monk and the Gun is best interpreted in that context.
“We are a very isolated, poor country up in the Himalayas, but we are a country that values happiness over anything else, and that’s what makes us unique… We believe in something called interdependence, and we believe that real happiness is only achieved when all things around us are good, perfect, and happy,” Dorji said. “So, we have many strange rules in this little country… We [could] benefit immensely from mountain climbing, but because we want our mountains to be clean, protected, we don’t allow mountain climbing. Other Himalayan countries, they make millions of dollars by letting people climb Mt. Everest, K-2, Annapurna, Kangchejunga. But in Bhutan, we don’t allow mountain climbing. We are a big tourist destination, but we have a tariff on tourism. So, it’s quality over quantity.”
Dorji continued, “With these policies, we might be a poor country, but we try and create a cause and conditions for happiness to manifest. It has made us the only carbon negative country in the world. It has made us home to the very last mountains in the world that have not been climbed or claimed by man.”
The film could hardly be a better fit for the World Culture Film Festival, a four-day event with the ethos of “bringing stories from every part of the world that elevate human consciousness through the art of cinema.” WCFF is presented by the Art of Living Foundation, an NGO created by spiritual leader and humanitarian Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (what might be called a sister event, the World Culture Festival, drew an estimated 1 million people in Washington, DC last year, including dignitaries that ranged from former UN Secretary General H.E. Ban Ki-Moon, to U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, Sen. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, and Japan’s former First Lady Akie Abe, widow of the assassinated former prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe).
“Yes, media, entertainment, cinema has such a deep impact on people and people’s minds. Can we make this a tool to uplift the human consciousness?” Ravi Shankar asked, as he joined the WCFF audience on the festival’s opening night. “Can we make movies a medium to bring more happiness to people, more belongingness among people? Can we do that?”
He added, “Movies have to be uplifting because movies do create role models. Unfortunately, negative emotions are confused or taken as an identity for macho-ness or valor or heroism. Every child wants to be a hero. She or he wants to be a hero. And that role model, is it serving its purpose? Is it uplifting the human mind? This is what we need to do. Think about it. And so I’m glad that so many of you from the entertainment industry — producers, actors, and directors — are here. And you are seeing this vision, seeing what you can do, how you can impact the world consciousness of coming together…”
Dorji earned an Academy Award nomination for his 2019 film Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, becoming the first Bhutanese filmmaker to achieve that distinction. That film was chosen as Bhutan’s official Oscar entry in the Best International Film category, as was The Monk and the Gun. Dorji shot both films in Bhutan.
“My previous film, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, I made that in a very, very remote location, a yak herding village high up in the mountains. And in that village, we didn’t even have electricity, we had to bring in solar batteries to make that film,” he explained. “With this film [The Monk and the Gun], because our film industry is so small, all our actors are first-time actors. Most of them are playing themselves. The village lama is actually a village lama… The villagers are all playing themselves, as well. All the crew members, they are all part-time filmmakers coming on film sets to make films out of passion because they have this love for this art. But when they’re not making films, they are cooks, waiters, just doing odd jobs. And that’s how our industry is.”
Dorji added, “When you come from a background like that and when you have to work with such circumstances and you have festivals like the World Culture Film Festival here, giving us this opportunity to showcase ourselves, it means a lot.”
Dorji said The Monk and the Gun “is really about innocence. It is about how a culture that celebrates innocence, when they open up all of a sudden and modernize culture, innocence can sometimes be mistaken to be ignorance. And this film is a celebration of the quality of innocence, which I think is a very, very important quality for humanity. And we’re getting disconnected with that because of worldly values.”
Dorji is expected to make it to Los Angeles in time for the awards ceremony of the World Culture Film Festival on Sunday. The closing night film, screening Saturday evening, is Wim Wenders’ highly acclaimed Perfect Days, which earned an Oscar nomination earlier this year for Best International Film.
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