Hidden Bhutan by Uitz Martin;McBride Nathaniel;

Author:Uitz, Martin;McBride, Nathaniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4805199
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2017-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Passing out in a Wooden Trough

Bhutanese cinema and the erotics of a traditional hot stone bath

Standing in the foyer of the only cinema in Thimphu, the lead actor was clearly enjoying his popularity. Even Bhutan’s tiny film industry can’t get by without stars. Travellers and Magicians, the box office hit of 2004, had been playing to mostly packed houses for the last four weeks, and every evening at six o’clock both young and old had thronged the entrance to the cinema.

Tsewang, the young hero of the three-hour epic, came to the screenings almost every day. In Thimphu everyone knows everyone else, and here people stopped to shake his hand, talk with him and clap him on the shoulder. The film has actually had something of a success, and in recent years has been shown at alternative film festivals in Amsterdam, Vladivostok and Munich, where its exoticism has drawn considerable attention.

Nevertheless, filmmaking in Bhutan has at best remained a sideline for a few obsessives, who, while working in the shadow of the biggest film industry in the world based in Mumbai, have managed to pursue their own line both artistically and in terms of content. No one in Bhutan can make a living from making films. The producers and directors are generally high-ranking officials, journalists, or – as in the case of Travellers and Magicians – highly-educated lamas. Tsewang is a radio reporter, and tourists know him as the ex-husband of Jamie Zeppa, a Canadian teacher who has written one of the most moving books about Bhutan, the story of her love for, and marriage to, one of her pupils. Today he works at the BBS, the Bhutan Broadcasting Service, and has become the enfant terrible of Thimphu’s evening scene, as well as, on occasion, a film hero.

The entire crew – actors, camera people, lighting assistants, assistant directors and best boys – were amateurs. They filmed with semi-professional high-definition video cameras, since they had neither the money nor the opportunity to buy celluloid. An actor who in the film plays an old man living together with his beautiful, much younger wife in a remote cabin in the woods, told me that shortage of funds also meant that most scenes could be rehearsed just once and then shot in a single take.

In fact the actor lives in a small farmer’s house near Paro, and is a retired civil servant who spent half his life working as a maintenance officer at the Bhutanese embassy in New Delhi. There he had the opportunity to observe the film-mad Indians and the incredible cult of their stars at a time when there existed neither cinema nor television in Bhutan.

It pleased him that I had stopped him in the street and told him I had recognised his face from somewhere. ‘Maybe you saw me in the movies,’ he smiled, when I asked him where I had seen him before. We ended up having a long conversation over tea and cakes about Bhutan’s filmmakers, the magic of a

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