Director Pawo Choyning Dorji interview: On Bhutanese modernity and echoes of Edward Yang in ‘The Monk and the Gun’

There’s a poster of A Brighter Summer Day hanging in Pawo Choyning Dorji’s home. It’s a tribute to the late Edward Yang, but also something far more personal. “The little girl in the film,” he tells me, “Chang Chen’s little sister... that little girl is my wife.”

There’s something almost sacred in the intimacy of this little aside during our conversation that caught me by surprise. And yet it seems quite fitting. The Taiwanese auteur’s legacy of stillness, his emotional patience, and the manner in which he held memory and modernity in the same breath — all feel strikingly alive in Pawo’s oeuvre of cinema.

It’s an inheritance Pawo carries with grace, if not intentionality. “I never went to film school,” he says. “I studied political science.” It was precisely this confluence — studying politics in the U.S. during the invasion of Iraq while watching his homeland, Bhutan, gently usher in a democratic transition — that sparked something deeper in him. “American students would say, it is the duty of America to give democracy to people who don’t have it... the gift of democracy,” he recalls. “I was from a country where we were literally gifted democracy. But we didn’t ask for it. We didn’t fight for it. There was no revolution, no war, and yet we weren’t necessarily ready for it. I don’t even know if we’re ready for it now.”

That tension between the “gift” and the cost, between imposed modernity and lived tradition, is the soul of The Monk and the Gun, Pawo’s latest political satire. On paper, it’s a farcical telling of a monk in Bhutan tasked with finding a gun during the country’s first national election. But beneath the comedic conceit lies some crushing insight into how nations rich in an inner life, like Bhutan, have risked spiritual amnesia in their pursuit of ‘prosperous’ external systems.

“When I premiered the film in Bhutan,” Pawo says, “people were crying. I never expected that. I thought I made a satire. But for Bhutanese audiences, it was something else. One person told me, ‘This reminded us of how, in the pursuit of something we thought we needed, we lost something we already had.’” He continues, “That’s not something I would’ve learned in a political science class. That’s something I only realised at the very end, once the audience showed me what the film really meant.”

Though it’s not just the political system of his homeland that Pawo interrogates. He’s also reckoning with what modernity is doing to its spirit. “If you come to Bhutan, the phallus is a very important part of our culture,” he says. “We are a tantric Buddhist country, and everything has meaning.” In tantric thought, inhibition is the final barrier to enlightenment, and the solution seems to be more embarrassment. “If you have water in your ears, a Bhutanese will say: put more water,” he laughs. “You want to destroy inhibition? Put yourself in situations where you constantly feel it. You see a phallus, you feel embarrassed, you feel shy, but that’s okay. Because actually, in the end, nothing exists.”

Towards the end of the film, an American who arrived seeking a firearm leaves with a towering wooden phallus. “The gun represents something foreign,” Pawo explains. “Western, modern, but also a bringer of suffering. The phallus, on the other hand, is our tradition. This juxtaposition is no accident. Both are ‘phallic, ’” Pawo says with a half-smile. “Both are masculine. But one represents fear, and the other represents freedom.” More regretfully, the one native to Bhutan is disappearing. “Growing up, they were everywhere. But as we became more modern and Westernised, we began to feel embarrassed by them, and so they vanished. The very thing that was supposed to help us transcend inhibition became the source of it.”

In Pawo’s Bhutan, these symbols are never inert and ripple outward personally, politically, and metaphysically. Yet, the road to manifesting these stories onscreen is anything but seamless. The Bhutanese film industry, as he tells me, is nascent, bordering on non-existent. His Oscar-nominated 2019 debut, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, was shot with a single camera and no electricity. “It was a solar-powered film,” he says, laughing. “Even now, with more recognition, we still truck every piece of equipment in from Delhi.”

Still, Bhutan offers Pawo something few other places could as a spiritual ground to stand on, even as his gaze grows more global. Recently, he contributed a segment to Tales of Taipei, a collaborative anthology film about life in the Taiwanese capital. “In Bhutan, we roll out of bed at eight, make coffee, then discuss what to shoot that day. In Taiwan, the crew was on set at 3 or 4 in the morning. It was quite intense, but also very professional.” Still, Taiwan isn’t foreign terrain for Pawo. His wife and children are Taiwanese and he calls it a second home.

In fact, his entire aesthetic sits at a confluence of worlds: East and West, past and present, tradition and transformation. He cites Kore-eda for his realism, Tarantino for his audacity, and, most meaningfully, his own spiritual and creative mentor, Dzongsar Khyentse Norbu. “He was the one who saw I was a storyteller before I knew it myself,” Pawo says. “His films are deeper, more philosophical, and I once told him my films would be more cheesy in comparison. And he said, ‘Well, if cheesy is done right, it works.’” Indeed, “cheesy” might be the last word anyone would use to describe Pawo’s films. His frames feel like paintings. His stories take their time. And his humour, like his politics, comes from deep within.

Pawo tells me, “You will never see your own eyelashes because they are so close to you” — something the Buddha once said. The thought felicitously explains why his films often turn inward, searching for what’s been missed in plain sight. While the world rushes to look outward, to see farther, Pawo seems more preoccupied with what we’ve stopped noticing up close. Perhaps that’s where the spirit of Edward Yang lingers most clearly in his films. In the tenderness to look at one’s own culture, to question it without cruelty, and to hold its contradictions and absurdities with care.

To see clearly. Even especially, when it’s your own eyelashes in the way.

The Monk and the Gun is currently available to stream on MUBI