Filmed in a remote Bhutan village, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom captures a way of life that is rapidly vanishing. Its Oscar-nominated director talks about growing up in a country where prosperity is measured by happiness, not GDP
It took eight days for Pawo Choyning Dorji to trek up to the location of his debut film, a settlement of 56 people so high in the Himalayas that it had no communication with the world below. Everything his 35-strong crew might need for the shoot had to be hauled up by mule, with solar batteries for power because there was no electricity. The villagers he was enlisting to take part had never seen a lightbulb. “They’d never even seen sliced bread,” he says, “and had no idea how to eat it.” Nor did they have any understanding of what it might mean to appear in a film. “My only instruction to them was, ‘Tell your story to this box.’”
The result is a unique and beautiful film, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom. Nominated for the best international film Oscar last year, Lunana records a way of life in Bhutan that was vanishing in real time: even as the company were packing up after the 2018 shoot, engineers were moving in to install the first 3G masts alongside the yaks grazing on the mountainside.
