Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom – ‘I felt like if we went through hardship, it could translate into the film’

No wonder the Bhutanese film-maker Pawo Choyning Dorji is always smiling.

As long ago as 1729, the legal code of Bhutan held that the “purpose of the government is to provide happiness to its people. If it cannot provide happiness, there is no reason for the government to exist.” Then, in the mid-1970s, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck introduced the term gross national happiness, which he declared more important than gross domestic product, as GDP can’t deliver happiness and wellbeing.

“There are many different laws based on gross national happiness, which may not make sense to people beyond our country,” Dorji says. “As Buddhists we believe that everything is interconnected. So it is part of our constitution that our country must maintain 75 per cent forest. People might say that’s really stupid, because you have a lot of trees and your country can become rich by felling them. But we must be in harmony with the environment we live in. Economic development and prosperity must go hand in hand with the protection of our culture.

Mountain climbing is not allowed in Bhutan, because we believe the Himalayas are home to the mythical snow lions. I’m very proud to come from a country with these laws

“We’re not going to flood our country with tourism. We could make a lot of money, like Nepal and India, by letting people climb our mountains. But mountain climbing is not allowed in Bhutan, because we believe the Himalayas are home to the mythical snow lions. I’m very proud to come from a country with these laws.”

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Dorji’s Oscar-nominated feature, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, pitches GNH against GDP in a heartwarming tale set in what is billed as the world’s most remote school. As the film opens, Ugyen Dorji (Sherab Dorji) has one year of teaching left in his mandatory five-year commitment to Bhutan’s government. He’s hoping to skip the final year and emigrate to Australia, to make some money and pursue his dream of becoming a singer.

Instead the ministry of education has earmarked him for a primary school in Lunana, a far-flung Himalayan village that is one day by bus and seven more days of reluctant hiking away. Its electricity is skittishly dependent on solar power, the school doesn’t even have a blackboard, and the locals earnestly hail the teaching profession as one that gloriously “touches the future”.

“He could have been a doctor or someone who goes up to measure the melting glaciers, but I made him a teacher because I wanted to touch upon real challenging issues that are impacting Bhutan right now,” Dorji says. “Teaching is the one profession that has the most number of people who quit. We might want to ignore this issue, but we have this problem. And veneration of the teacher is important in Buddhism. I’m happy to say that, because of this film, I’ve gotten many messages from teachers who were saying that they wanted to quit but then have decided to stay on. Some were even inspired to request postings in Lunana.”

The hero’s difficult journey was mirrored by that of the film-makers. Dorji had to cast his movie from Lunana’s population of 50 people, none of whom had ever watched a film. He and his crew then had to shoot it in the village, a community of nomadic yak herders 3,400km above sea level. (The peak of Carrauntoohil, Ireland’s highest mountain, is barely more than 1,000m above sea level.) There was no running water, and it was desperately cold. The production team, who were entirely reliant on solar panels and batteries, studied 15 years of rainfall records to estimate which days they could film on.

“Once we got up and we started shooting, there was only a certain amount of hours available,” the director says (who was also kicked in the pelvis by the titular yak, put in the classroom by a villager who wanted to show the teacher how important the animal is to them). “So that was reserved to power our camera and our sound. I didn’t have the luxury of watching dailies, because we only had enough power to shoot and charge our laptop to get the footage on the drive. We didn’t have the luxury of seeing what was missing, what was working. We were working blind.

“But I feel like all these challenges made us more meticulous, because we knew we didn’t have that safety blanket. If we were missing a certain shot we couldn’t say, ‘Let’s go back out.’ This was a small film to tell the story of my country. Back then I had no idea where it would go. I used to joke with the crew that, even if this film fails, we can take pride that we made a film that had a zero carbon footprint.”

In the tradition of Robert J Flaherty, the pioneering ethnographer who shot Man of Aran in the Aran Islands in 1934, Dorji built his script around his subjects. Pem Zam, the enthusiastic “class captain” (and audience favourite) who lives with her drunken father and grandmother, is just as she appears on screen. The film-maker’s wife, Stephanie Lai, helped coach the amateur cast over a lengthy 18-month preproduction stint.

“I wanted this film to be as authentic as possible,” the director says. “That included the crew and me. I felt like if we went through this hardship, then it could translate into the film. And we really had a hard time. Many of our crew members were getting altitude sickness, being up there for so long. And living in a place that is so cut off from the rest of the world – no telephone, no change of clothes – really affects you emotionally and mentally. We used all nonprofessional actors. Most of the highlanders are playing themselves. But I think if I had cheated and set it in an easier location, we wouldn’t have characters like Pem Zam or the head man of the village.”

As Ireland celebrates the Cinderella story of An Cailín Ciúin’s shortlisting for an Oscar, it’s worth noting that Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom got there first.

[ Oscar nominations 2023: Donald Clarke on an astonishing, record-shattering year for Irish film ]

The Dzongkha-language film was nominated for best international feature last year, at the 94th Academy Awards. It almost missed out making it that far, first because Bhutan produces so few movies that it no longer had an Oscar-nominating committee, and then because the academy’s website recognised neither the country nor its language. (The site had to be updated to enable his film’s nomination, according to the director.)

Another reason why it was remarkable for the film to secure international distribution and make it to Hollywood’s biggest bash is that Dzongkha is so rooted in Buddhism that many of its words can’t be translated.

“Our national language was solely created for the purpose of teaching the Buddha’s teachings,” Dorji says. “I am a practising Buddhist. I don’t want to sound like I’m preaching. I’ve tried, in a very subtle way, to show that, because of global consumption and global warming, enlightenment is disappearing from our world. I might seem worldly, but really I’m hopelessly Buddhist.”

The trek that brought Dorji to the Himalayan peaks was preceded by a longer journey. The son of a diplomat, he was born in Darjeeling and schooled in India and Bhutan. After graduating from Lawrence University, in the United States, he studied under the Dalai Lama at the College for Higher Tibetan Studies.

“I come from a very different background from the people in my film,” Dorji says. “I went back to Bhutan and rediscovered my own culture and traditions. Every element of this film is based on true accounts, including experiences that I went through myself. If you ever come to Bhutan you will realise that every facet of life is so integrated and ingrained in Buddhist values, even the way we build our houses.

“But there are realities our country faces. We are a developing country, and with that we have growing pains. There’s a lot of rural-to-urban migration, and on top of that there are a lot of people leaving Bhutan to go elsewhere, like the protagonist of the story in this film.

“We were the last country in the world to connect to the internet. We were the last country in the world to connect to television. So suddenly, in the 2000s, we can see what the world is beyond the mountains. We are the happiest country in the world, but what happens when our idea of happiness changes?”

And Dorji smiles. Like he always does.

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom opens on Friday, March 10th