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 time Day hanging in Pawo Choyning Dorji’s house. It’s a tribute to the late Edward Yang, but additionally one thing much more private. “The little lady within the movie,” he tells me, “Chang Chen’s little sister… that little lady is my spouse.”

There’s one thing nearly sacred within the intimacy of this little apart throughout our dialog that caught me abruptly. And but it appears fairly becoming. The Taiwanese auteur’s legacy of stillness, his emotional endurance, and the style by which he held reminiscence and modernity in the identical breath — all really feel strikingly alive in Pawo’s oeuvre of cinema.

It’s an inheritance Pawo carries with grace, if not intentionality. “I by no means went to movie faculty,” he says. “I studied political science.” It was exactly this confluence — finding out politics within the U.S. in the course of the invasion of Iraq whereas watching his homeland, Bhutan, gently usher in a democratic transition — that sparked one thing deeper in him. “American college students would say, it’s the obligation of America to present democracy to individuals who don’t have it… the reward of democracy,” he remembers. “I used to be from a rustic the place we had been actually gifted democracy. However we didn’t ask for it. We didn’t battle for it. There was no revolution, no warfare, and but we weren’t essentially prepared for it. I don’t even know if we’re prepared for it now.”

That stress between the “reward” and the fee, between imposed modernity and lived custom, is the soul of The Monk and the Gun, Pawo’s newest political satire. On paper, it’s a farcical telling of a monk in Bhutan tasked with discovering a gun in the course of the nation’s first nationwide election. However beneath the comedic conceit lies some crushing perception into how nations wealthy in an inside life, like Bhutan, have risked non secular amnesia of their pursuit of ‘affluent’ exterior programs.

“Once I premiered the movie in Bhutan,” Pawo says, “individuals had been crying. I by no means anticipated that. I assumed I made a satire. However for Bhutanese audiences, it was one thing else. One individual informed me, ‘This reminded us of how, within the pursuit of one thing we thought we wanted, we misplaced one thing we already had.’” He continues, “That’s not one thing I’d’ve realized in a political science class. That’s one thing I solely realised on the very finish, as soon as the viewers confirmed me what the movie actually meant.”

Although it’s not simply the political system of his homeland that Pawo interrogates. He’s additionally reckoning with what modernity is doing to its spirit. “In case you come to Bhutan, the phallus is an important a part of our tradition,” he says. “We’re a tantric Buddhist nation, and all the pieces has that means.” In tantric thought, inhibition is the ultimate barrier to enlightenment, and the answer appears to be extra embarrassment. “When you’ve got water in your ears, a Bhutanese will say: put extra water,” he laughs. “You need to destroy inhibition? Put your self in conditions the place you continually really feel it. You see a phallus, you’re feeling embarrassed, you’re feeling shy, however that’s okay. As a result of really, in the long run, nothing exists.”

A nonetheless from ‘The Monk and the Gun’
| Photograph Credit score:
MUBI

In direction of the tip of the movie, an American who arrived looking for a firearm leaves with a towering picket phallus. “The gun represents one thing international,” Pawo explains. “Western, fashionable, but additionally a bringer of struggling. The phallus, alternatively, is our custom. This juxtaposition is not any accident. Each are ‘phallic, ’” Pawo says with a half-smile. “Each are masculine. However one represents worry, and the opposite represents freedom.” Extra regretfully, the one native to Bhutan is disappearing. “Rising up, they had been all over the place. However as we grew to become extra fashionable and Westernised, we started to really feel embarrassed by them, and they also vanished. The very factor that was supposed to assist us transcend inhibition grew to become the supply of it.”

In Pawo’s Bhutan, these symbols are by no means inert and ripple outward personally, politically, and metaphysically. But, the highway to manifesting these tales onscreen is something however seamless. The Bhutanese movie trade, as he tells me, is nascent, bordering on non-existent. His Oscar-nominated 2019 debut, Lunana: A Yak within the Classroom, was shot with a single digital camera and no electrical energy. “It was a solar-powered movie,” he says, laughing. “Even now, with extra recognition, we nonetheless truck each piece of apparatus in from Delhi.”

Nonetheless, Bhutan presents Pawo one thing few different locations may as a non secular floor to face on, at the same time as his gaze grows extra international. Just lately, he contributed a phase to Tales of Taipei, a collaborative anthology movie about life within the Taiwanese capital. “In Bhutan, we roll away from bed at eight, make espresso, then talk about what to shoot that day. In Taiwan, the crew was on set at 3 or 4 within the morning. It was fairly intense, but additionally very skilled.” Nonetheless, Taiwan isn’t international terrain for Pawo. His spouse and kids are Taiwanese and he calls it a second house.

In reality, his complete aesthetic sits at a confluence of worlds: East and West, previous and current, custom and transformation. He cites Kore-eda for his realism, Tarantino for his audacity, and, most meaningfully, his personal non secular and inventive mentor, Dzongsar Khyentse Norbu. “He was the one who noticed I used to be a storyteller earlier than I knew it myself,” Pawo says. “His movies are deeper, extra philosophical, and I as soon as informed him my movies could be extra tacky compared. And he stated, ‘Nicely, if tacky is finished proper, it really works.’” Certainly, “tacky” may be the final phrase anybody would use to explain Pawo’s movies. His frames really feel like work. His tales take their time. And his humour, like his politics, comes from deep inside.

Pawo Choyning Dorji behind the scenes of ‘The Monk and the Gun’
| Photograph Credit score:
Roadside Sights

Pawo tells me, “You’ll by no means see your personal eyelashes as a result of they’re so near you” — one thing the Buddha as soon as stated. The thought felicitously explains why his movies typically flip inward, looking for what’s been missed in plain sight. Whereas the world rushes to look outward, to see farther, Pawo appears extra preoccupied with what we’ve stopped noticing up shut. Maybe that’s the place the spirit of Edward Yang lingers most clearly in his movies. Within the tenderness to take a look at one’s personal tradition, to query it with out cruelty, and to carry its contradictions and absurdities with care.

To see clearly. Even particularly, when it’s your personal eyelashes in the way in which.

The Monk and the Gun is at the moment out there to stream on MUBI

Printed – July 30, 2025 07:23 pm IST