Word: bhutan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...meaning "precious one," as reincarnate lamas are called) has broadened the scope of what he wryly terms his "usual sort of profession." In 1992, after meeting director Bernardo Bertolucci through friends in London, he served as an adviser on Bertolucci's Little Buddha, parts of which were shot in Bhutan. Then in 1998 he brought a small crew that included several of his longtime Western students to a Tibetan monastery in Bir, India, to shoot The Cup, a film based on the true story of the young resident monks' impious obsession with World Cup football. "Buddhism is their philosophy," read...
...shooting in Bhutan is more complicated. Despite its breathtakingly cinematic scenery, the long-isolated kingdom couldn't be less suited to the mechanics of moviemaking. Cameras must be lugged up treacherous footpaths, electricity is scarce, and film must be flown out on one of the country's only two planes for processing in Bangkok. Television came to Bhutan in 1999. And, says Khyentse Norbu, those Bhutanese who know what movies are regard them as purveyances of violence and sex?hardly an appropriate hobby for a reincarnate saint. Gaining permission to bring the 16 foreigners in his crew...
...bits, might be impossible to execute if he were the one in the director's chair. But these worries were mostly unfounded. The cast he ultimately assembled includes a folklore scholar who plays a monk, a monk trained in pure mathematics who plays a tractor driver, an official from Bhutan's Royal Monetary Authority who is also a former member of the national football team, a lieutenant colonel in the King's bodyguard and a charismatic TV reporter with a journalism degree from the University of California, Berkeley. They're a devout but cosmopolitan bunch, and they've taken their...
...Khyentse Norbu's script, like the process of shooting it, confronts questions of what it means for Bhutan to modernize. The movie opens with a traditional archery tournament in which Dondup, a self-absorbed young village official who wears white high-top sneakers and an I LOVE NEW YORK T shirt under his traditional Bhutanese dress, scoffs at the simplicity of his hamlet and dreams of quitting Bhutan for America where he has heard he can get rich from picking grapes. When he receives a letter offering him a chance to leave Bhutan if he can make...
...comes across along the highway is an 81-year-old apple-seller, played appropriately by an 81-year-old apple-seller whom Khyentse Norbu found in a market in Thimpu. The apple man in the film?and on the set?is a perfect representative of the innocence of old Bhutan that Dondup initially finds so unattractive. Despite the crew's genuine efforts to make him understand that he's an actor, the apple-seller thinks everything about the shoot is real. For three weeks, each time he is asked to board a vehicle bound in the story for Thimpu...