Friday, January 28, 2022

Life in Buddhist Bhutan: "Yak in the Classroom"



Padmasambhava, an icon in Bhutan
(Movie Coverage, Jan. 17, 2022) This is the trailer for the 2022 release of Bhutan's second Oscar submission, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom. Sherab Dorji © 2022, Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Bhutan is a wondrous Buddhist land high in the Himalayas. It is a former kingdom and the innovator of the "gross domestic happiness" index, thumbing its nose at miserable capitalist nations, like us in the West.

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
It has kept to its simpler ways or did when there was a benevolent king calling the shots. But now elements of modernity are creeping, and there's no one to stop them. Here, a young man passes his exams and applies to be a teacher, a government job. He doesn't take his first assignment very seriously so is relocated to the most isolated classroom in the world, on the roof of the world. That improves his outlook, except for the yak in the classroom.

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