10 Films & TV Shows Set In Bhutan
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Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
🇧🇹 Bhutan New South WalesFind what you seek in a place you never expected. — A teacher struggling for inspiration travels to the most remote school in the world. It takes being so far away to understand the importance of his work... and to appreciate the value of yak dung!
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The Red Phallus
🇧🇹 BhutanSangai, a teenage girl living with her father in a village of inland Bhutan, is not happy with her father, who makes wooden phalluses, believed to have mysterious power, and playing a festival clown with a red mask at a local festival. She reluctantly delivers the phalluses to neighbors but she is followed by dozens of men with red masks and costumes when walking through the hill. Conflict and tension grows between the father, who has concerns about his successor, and Sangai, who has a clandestine relationship with a married man.
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Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait
🇧🇹 BhutanThe dazzling new film from Bhutanese lama and filmmaker Khyentse Norbu (The Cup, Travellers and Magicians) chronicles a sacred jungle ritual whose masked, anonymous participants seek after complete self-knowledge — or descend into thievery, violation, and murder.
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Happiness
🇧🇹 Bhutan The 1990sPeyangki is a dreamy and solitary eight-year-old monk living in Laya, a Bhutanese village perched high in the Himalayas. Soon the world will come to him: the village is about to be connected to electricity, and the first television will flicker on before Peyangki's eyes.
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Arrows Of The Thunder Dragon
🇧🇹 Bhutan The 1970sSet in the 1970s, the story follows brother and sister Kuenphen and Jamyang where in a remote Bhutanese village, they learn traditional archery from their old warrior grandfather. Their mothers sudden sickness gives Kuenphen the opportunity to explore the world outside the village, while sister Jamyang must stay home to weave, cook and get married. Filmed entirely on location in the breathtaking Himalaya mountains, the actors are made up of local highland village people. The 'ordinary' current traditional medieval life in tiny isolated Bhutan is fascinating and anything but ordinary from a modern western point of view.
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Batman Begins
🇧🇹 Bhutan The 2000sEvil fears the knight. — Driven by tragedy, billionaire Bruce Wayne dedicates his life to uncovering and defeating the corruption that plagues his home, Gotham City. Unable to work within the system, he instead creates a new identity, a symbol of fear for the criminal underworld - The Batman.
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Travellers and Magicians
🇧🇹 Bhutan TibetThe bitter and the sweet of temporary things. — A young government official, named Dondup, who is smitten with America (he even has a denim gho) dreams of escaping there while stuck in a beautiful but isolated village. He hopes to connect in the U.S. with a visa out of the country. He misses the one bus out of town to Thimphu, however, and is forced to hitchhike and walk along the Lateral Road to the west, accompanied by an apple seller, a Buddhist monk with his ornate, dragon-headed dramyin, a drunk, a widowed rice paper maker, and his beautiful daughter, Sonam.
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The Other Final
🇧🇹 Bhutan The 2000sThe Other Final is a 2003 documentary film, directed by Johan Kramer, about a football match between Bhutan and Montserrat, the then-lowest ranked teams in the FIFA World Rankings.
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Epoch
🇧🇹 BhutanEvolution. Is this the beginning or the end? — Disaster strikes as a specialised team of investigators struggle to find out the truth about a strange monolith which sends out an intercontinental signal.
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Little Buddha
Washington 🇮🇳 India 🇧🇹 Bhutan The 5th Century BCA magical journey to a place where the past and present meet — After the death of Lama Dorje, Tibetan Buddhist monks find three children — one American and two Nepalese — who may be the rebirth of their great teacher.