Word: norbu
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...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...
...Another character Dondup 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...
...Khyentse Norbu was born in 1961 in eastern Bhutan to a Bhutanese mother and a Tibetan high lama father. His paternal grandfather had also been a lama. So no one in the family was too surprised when, at the age of seven, Khyentse Norbu was approached at his Jesuit elementary school by a group of Tibetan monks. They informed him that he had been identified as the third reincarnation of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, a lama and theologian who presided over Dzongsar Monastery in eastern Tibet in the 19th century. The monks took the young rinpoche to Sikkim, now in modern...
...Hong Kong's Convention and Exhibition Center last summer, he told his audience that they could go to sleep if they wanted because the sutra he was about to teach was "very, very long and rather boring"; he then held them rapt for more than three hours. Film, Khyentse Norbu argues, is an ideal vehicle for transmitting Buddhist wisdom with freshness in the 21st century: "(For a long time) Buddhism has the tradition of using all kinds of mediums: statues, paintings, monasteries. And although it's difficult for people to accept, I see film as a modern-day tanka...
...Khyentse Norbu's provocative take on Himalayan Buddhist convention is also evident in the way he interacts with his cast and crew. On set, he's the least formal of lamas, sipping water out of a Sesame Street cup and expertly indulging his typically Bhutanese penchant for obscenely dirty jokes. "Most so-called rinpoches like myself are too perfect," he says, sitting outside the bamboo shack that has served as his home for the final month of shooting. "And when you have someone who's perfect up there, when you're looking at a so-called perfect being, it doesn...