WARNING: SPOILERS

After seeing the movie with friends at Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, we gathered on the sidewalk outside and talked up its virtues—of which there are many. Sounding one sour note was—of course—me. I thought they shouldn’t have made the lead, Ugyen Dorji (Sherab Dorji), such a jerk in the beginning because it telegraphed where the movie was going. He would arrive in Lunana, a village of a few dozen in the Himalayan mountains of Bhutan, to teach at the remotest school in the world, and become a better person in the process.

“So we’re just waiting for this to happen,” I said, making the “hurry up” motion with my hand.

Even as I said it, though, I began to wonder if this wasn’t a virtue. We’re impatient along with Ugyen. And as he succumbs to the village’s charms, to a pace of life outside of the fast-paced one technology has created, we succumb, too. We’re transformed, too. “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” is one of those rare movies that leaves you feeling so peaceful you sit and watch to the end of the credits because you don’t want to break the spell. You want to hold onto that feeling a little longer.

Singing to offer
The movie itself is a Cinderella story. Bhutan barely has a movie industry, its writer-director, Pawo Choyning Dorji, had no money, and the village where he wanted to shoot was inaccessible by car or train or anything. More, the villagers he wanted to use for key roles not only hadn’t acted before, they hadn’t seen a movie before. Yet, from this, “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” became only the second film from Bhutan—after “The Cup” in 1999—to be officially submitted by Bhutan for Oscar consideration. That was in Sept. 2020. The Academy then refused to accept the submission because Bhutan’s selection committee hadn’t been Academy-approved or something. So Bhutan jumped through the hoops, submitted it again, and this year it was nominated for best foreign-language film.

“When I found out, it was so unbelievable that I kept telling my friends: ‘What if I wake up tomorrow and I realize all this was a dream?’” Dorji told The New York Times.

Ugyen is a teacher in his last year of government training but he’s uninspired and uninspiring. He lives with his grandmother in Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, has some nice friends, has a cute but quiet girlfriend, and seems to think highly of himself. He wants to be a singer in Australia, for example, but when we finally hear him sing we go, “Fine, but … C’mon, kid.”

Then he’s assigned the Lunana gig.

As he makes the trek there, first by bus, then via a seven-day hike led by Lunanan villager Michen (Ugyen Norbu Lhendup, charming), the movie lets us know, via title graphics, the area they’re passing through, its population and its elevation. The populations diminish as the elevations rise, but in my head I badly mistranslated the elevation. For some reason I kept thinking “a meter’s about a foot, right? Five thousand meters, five thousand feet. I’ve begun hikes at that level. No big deal.” Wrong. A meter is more than a yard, and the elevation of Lunana is more than 17,000 feet—or 3,000 feet higher than the top of Mount Rainier. It’s a wonder there’s grass there at all.

Throughout the trek, Ugyen is fed, lodged, and treated with respect, to which he responds poorly, or at least blankly. He puts on his headphones to listen to music and bides his time. Basically he’s a man in purgatory. When he finally arrives in Lunana and sees his sparse accommodations and the run-down one-room schoolhouse, he decides he can’t even deal with purgatory. He tells the village leader, Asha (Kunzang Wangdi), he wants to go back. Asha nods, saddened, but requests a few days so Michen and the other guide can rest.

What changes him? It begins with Pem Zam. The next morning he’s awakened by an ebullient, bright student who has been elected to tell him when school starts, when it ends, and that he’s late. So he shows up, learns what they know and what they don’t. He sees all they don’t have. 

(Aside: Watching, I assumed they’d done some kind of nationwide search—like Selznick’s for Scarlett—in order to find a girl this cute and this good an actress for such a key role. Nope. Pam Zam is a Lunanan villager using her own name. Talk about lucking out. You go to a remote village on top of the world and find the cutest little girl in the world? Who can act? Part of me wonders if not having seen a movie or camera actually helped her in this regard. She doesn’t have that awkward self-consciousness of being perceived that we all have. She’s just natural.) 

Slowly things change. Ugyen asks Michen about paper to burn to keep warm and Michen tells him paper is far too precious; they use dried yak dung. Searching for it himself, and grabbing the wet kind, he comes upon a young woman, Saldon (Kelden Lhamo Gurung), singing songs of loss, who wants to sing the way the black-necked cranes sing: “not worrying who hears or what others think,” she says. “They sing to offer.” He’s quietly infatuated.

The rest of it is just progress. He agrees to stay for the full term as long as they can make a blackboard. He sends for more school supplies: laminated maps of the world, and of animal species, and of the western alphabet. He teaches them ABCs. He teaches them about brushing their teeth. The village teaches him.

Summer hours
At this point, the main questions are twofold:

1. Does he get romantically involved with Saldon? (No, thank goodness.)
2. And does he stay? Or does he return?

The real-life inspiration for the character, Namgay Dorji, who is now 35, did stay, for about a decade, but writer-director Pawo Dorji takes a more resonant path. When the time comes, Ugyen leaves, with deep regret, and with regret from the villagers. Then we see him in a pub in Australia trying to sing a song but nobody’s listening. So he stops. And he sings the song of loss that Saldon taught him. He sings, one imagines, to offer.

That could’ve been the end of the movie, and it would’ve been a good end, but Pawo offers another poignant shot: the one-room schoolhouse in Lunana, the laminated posters askew, becoming dilapidated again from disuse.

It’s sad, but … possibly not? Learning of the world, and learning the language of the world (English), might it not propel the villagers out into it—the way that Ugyen was propelled—and at the loss of their culture? These themes recall Olivier Assayas’ great 2008 film “L’Heure d’ete,” in which the siblings of a French family are scattered across the globe while the better possessions of their deceased mother wind up in a museum. “What aspect of French culture is still part of French daily life?” I wrote back then. “Where and what is our treasure?”

“Lunana” knows where the treasure is.