The Monk and the Gun (film)

The Monk and the Gun (Dzongkha transliteration commonly given as Gelong dang Mey-da) is a 2023 satirical drama written, directed and co-produced by Pawo Choyning Dorji. Set in the village of Ura in Bumthang in 2006, the film uses the Royal Government's mock-election exercises on the eve of Bhutan's democratic transition as the backdrop for a story that entwines an elderly lama's cryptic request for firearms with an American collector's search for a Civil War-era rifle. It was Dorji's second feature after Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (2019) and premiered at the 50th Telluride Film Festival on 1 September 2023.

Plot

The film opens in Ura, a remote village in the Bumthang valley, shortly before the Royal Government of Bhutan holds a nationwide mock election in preparation for the country's first parliamentary vote. Election officials arrive to teach villagers how to argue, canvass and cast ballots for three invented parties, a set of procedures that many Ura residents find baffling and, in some cases, corrosive to the communal habits that have long governed village life.

An elderly lama at the local monastery instructs his young attendant Tashi, played by Tandin Wangchuk, to bring him two guns before the full moon, which coincides with the day of the mock vote. The lama explains only that he needs them to "set things right." Tashi sets off through the countryside in search of firearms, objects almost unknown in Bhutanese villages of the period.

A parallel story follows Ron Coleman, an American collector played by Harry Einhorn, who has travelled to Bhutan to acquire an American Civil War-era rifle said to have been kept for generations by a farmer named Benji. Coleman, aided by a Bhutanese guide, offers a substantial sum for the weapon, a prospect that turns the antique into the most coveted object in the district. A third thread follows Tshomo, played by Deki Lhamo, whose marriage to Choephel frays under the pressure of partisan arguments imported into the household by the mock campaign.

The three strands converge on the day of the vote, when the lama's intentions for the guns are revealed in a quiet coda that resolves the story without violence. The ending has been read by most critics as a gentle rebuke of the assumption that imported political forms will automatically replace older communal practices.

Cast

• Tandin Wangchuk as Tashi, the young monk
• Kelsang Choejay as the Lama
• Deki Lhamo as Tshomo
• Harry Einhorn as Ron Coleman, the American collector
• Tandin Sonam as Benji, the farmer who owns the antique rifle
• Pema Zangmo Sherpa as Tshering Yangden, the election officer
• Choeying Jatsho as Choephel
• Tandin Phubz as Phurba
• Yuphel Lhendup Selden as Yuphel, Tshomo and Choephel's daughter

As with Lunana, Dorji cast mainly non-professionals. Most of the villagers on screen are residents of Ura itself. Tandin Wangchuk, who plays the monk Tashi, is known offscreen as the frontman of the Bhutanese alternative-rock band Misty Terrace.

Production

Dorji developed the screenplay during the international festival run of Lunana, drawing on his own recollection of the 2006-2007 mock-election period, which he observed as a young man. The project was assembled as an international co-production among Bhutan, Taiwan, France, the United States and Hong Kong, with Films Boutique handling world sales and Jean-Christophe Simon, Hsu Feng and Stephanie Lai joining Dorji as producers. Dangphu Dingphu, the Bhutanese outfit Dorji operates under the "3 Pigs Production" banner, remained the lead producer.

Principal photography took place largely in and around Ura, with additional work in the Thimphu and Paro valleys. Jigme Tenzing, who had shot Lunana, returned as cinematographer, while Hsiao Yun-Ku edited the film and the French composer Frederic Alvarez provided the score. The production recreated period details of the 2006 mock polls, including the invented party symbols and colour-coded ballots that the Election Commission of Bhutan used at the time to train voters.

Historical setting

The film dramatises a real and distinctive feature of Bhutan's democratic transition. In 2005 King Jigme Singye Wangchuck announced that the country would move from absolute monarchy to constitutional democracy, and the draft Constitution was circulated for public consultation in the same year. In April 2007 the Election Commission organised nationwide mock elections in which voters chose between three fictitious parties, each identified by a colour, so that citizens unfamiliar with contested politics could rehearse the mechanics of campaigning, voting and counting. Elections to the National Council followed later that year, and the first National Assembly election was held in March 2008.

Dorji telescopes this chronology into a single stretch of days in a single village. The mock election in the film stands in for the 2006-2007 exercises, and the lama's invocation of the full moon links the civic ritual of the vote to a Buddhist ceremony. The film is one of the few dramatic works to treat Bhutan's move to democracy directly, and the first to do so in a tone that is comic rather than ceremonial.

Themes

Critics read the film as a study of the friction between consensual village life and the adversarial habits that contested elections require. The household quarrels set off by the mock campaign, the officials who cannot persuade an elderly woman that voting against a neighbour is not an insult, and the villagers who treat the party colours as purely aesthetic choices are presented with affection rather than condescension. The American collector functions as a counterweight: a figure of global commerce who assumes that any object, including a relic carried through generations of a family, has a price.

Dorji has said in interviews that the film is not an argument against democracy but a record of what the transition looked like from inside a village that had not asked for it. The Buddhist framing, in which the lama's request for guns is ultimately absorbed into a ritual of renunciation, echoes a recurring concern in Bhutanese public life: whether inherited cultural forms can metabolise imported ones without losing their shape. The film also glances at Gross National Happiness, the state doctrine under which the democratic transition was framed, without naming it.

Release

The film had its world premiere on 1 September 2023 at the 50th Telluride Film Festival, where Pete Hammond of Deadline called it a stronger work than Lunana. It screened in the Special Presentations section of the Toronto International Film Festival later that month and subsequently at Busan, the BFI London Film Festival, the Rome Film Festival and the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. In October 2023 Roadside Attractions acquired North American theatrical rights. The film opened in limited release in the United States on 9 February 2024.

Reception

Reviews were broadly positive. On Rotten Tomatoes 94 per cent of 48 surveyed critics gave the film a favourable review, with an average rating of 8 out of 10. Metacritic recorded a weighted score of 74 out of 100 based on 13 critics, indicating "generally favourable" reviews. Writing in The Washington Post, the reviewer described the film as "a sly satire of democracy's perils." RogerEbert.com and KQED commended the performances of the non-professional cast and the restraint of Dorji's direction. The film grossed approximately 1.5 million US dollars at the worldwide box office, a modest figure that nevertheless made it one of the most commercially successful Bhutanese films released internationally.

Festival juries awarded it the Special Jury Prize at the Rome Film Festival in 2023 and the Audience Choice Award in the Showcase section of the Vancouver International Film Festival the same year.

Academy Awards

Bhutan selected The Monk and the Gun as its official submission to the 96th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category. In December 2023 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a shortlist of fifteen films from eighty-eight submissions, and The Monk and the Gun was among them. It was not among the five films selected for the final nomination in January 2024, an outcome widely noted in Bhutanese press coverage.

The distinction matters. Several Bhutanese and international outlets have loosely described the film as "nominated" for the Academy Award, but the correct status is "shortlisted," a step short of nomination. Even so, the shortlisting made The Monk and the Gun only the second Bhutanese film to reach that stage, after Lunana, which was nominated outright at the 94th Academy Awards in 2022.

Comparison with Lunana

The two films share a director, a cinematographer, a production company and a working method that relies on non-professional actors in remote locations. They differ in tone and register. Lunana is a sincere, observational study of a young teacher posted to a high-altitude school in Gasa Dzongkhag, structured around personal transformation. The Monk and the Gun is plotted, gently satirical and concerned with a collective moment rather than an individual one. Where Lunana ended with its protagonist half-returning to the village that had changed him, The Monk and the Gun ends with a village quietly refusing to be changed on terms it has not chosen.

Significance

Together with Lunana, The Monk and the Gun confirmed Pawo Choyning Dorji as the most internationally visible filmmaker to have emerged from Bhutan, extending a short but notable lineage that runs back through Khyentse Norbu's The Cup (1999) and Travellers and Magicians (2003). The film's shortlisting at the Oscars marked a second consecutive international high-water moment for Bhutanese cinema within two years, and it reached a wider foreign-language audience in North America than any previous Bhutanese film apart from Lunana. Its engagement with the 2008 democratic transition also made it one of the few Bhutanese features to take contemporary political history as its subject.

See also

• Pawo Choyning Dorji
• Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
• Cinema of Bhutan
• Khyentse Norbu
• Constitution of Bhutan
• 2008 National Assembly election
• Gross National Happiness

References

1. The Monk and the Gun — Wikipedia
2. Pete Hammond, "The Monk and the Gun Review: Bhutan Director Pawo Choyning Dorji's 2nd Film Even Tops the Oscar-Nominated Lunana" — Deadline, 2 September 2023
3. "Roadside Attractions Takes U.S. Rights to Bhutan Oscar Entry The Monk and the Gun" — Deadline, October 2023
4. "The Monk and the Gun: A Sly Satire of Democracy's Perils" — The Washington Post, 5 February 2024
5. Film review — RogerEbert.com
6. The Monk and the Gun — Metacritic
7. The Monk and the Gun — Rotten Tomatoes
8. The Monk and the Gun — Toronto International Film Festival
9. The Monk and the Gun — Roadside Attractions (official)
10. "Bhutan Villagers Learn About Democracy (and Teach Us Too)" — KQED, February 2024