Travellers and Magicians (film)

Travellers and Magicians is a 2003 Dzongkha-language drama film written and directed by Khyentse Norbu, the filmmaking name of the Bhutanese Buddhist teacher Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche. Produced as a Bhutan-Australia co-production and shot on location in the valleys of central Bhutan, it is widely cited as the first feature film made entirely inside the country.^[1] The film follows a restless young civil servant who dreams of emigrating to the United States, while a travelling monk tells him a parallel tale of a young magic student whose longing for another life leads him into an ambiguous, dreamlike affair.

It was the second feature by Khyentse Norbu after The Cup (1999), and appeared on the international festival circuit through 2003 and 2004. Reviewers generally praised its landscapes, its unhurried pace and its fable-within-a-fable structure, while some found the nested storytelling slow or opaque.^[2] For Bhutan, the significance was less about international box office than about precedent: a Dzongkha-language feature, made by a Bhutanese director with a largely non-professional Bhutanese cast, screened at major festivals abroad and in cinema halls at home.

Background and director

The film's director, Khyentse Norbu, was born in 1961 in eastern Bhutan and is recognised in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the third incarnation of the nineteenth-century master Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo. He holds a senior religious position as head of Dzongsar Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö's lineage and teaches internationally through the Khyentse Foundation and Siddhartha's Intent.^[3] His first feature, The Cup (1999), was shot at a Tibetan monastery in Bir, northern India, with refugee monks as the cast, and followed novice monks scheming to watch the 1998 football World Cup. The Cup was Bhutan's first submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, at the 72nd Academy Awards.^[4]

Travellers and Magicians was the first time Khyentse Norbu returned to Bhutan to shoot a feature. The production was backed by the Australian-based Prayer Flag Pictures, with producers Malcolm Watson and Raymond Steiner; post-production work was carried out in Australia and New Zealand. The cinematographer was Alan Kozlowski. The film's reported budget was around US$1.8 million, and it was distributed internationally by Zeitgeist Films.^[5]

Plot

The outer story follows Dondup, a young government official posted to a remote village. Frustrated by rural life and fixated on an offer to pick apples in the United States, he sets out for Thimphu to arrange a visa, but misses the only bus. He is forced to walk and hitch-hike along the Lateral Road, falling in with a shifting group of fellow travellers: an apple seller, a drunk, a young woman named Sonam and her father — a widowed maker of lokta paper — and a Buddhist monk carrying an ornate dragon-headed dramyin.

As the group waits for vehicles and shares meals by the roadside, the monk tells a story to tease Dondup out of his preoccupation with America. The inner tale concerns Tashi, a reluctant student of magic who resents his older brother Karma's discipline. Tashi wanders into a remote forest and is taken in by an older man and his much younger wife. Drawn into an affair, he becomes entangled in a slow, dreamlike sequence of desire, jealousy and violence whose reality the film deliberately leaves ambiguous.

The two storylines run alongside each other, with the monk returning to Tashi's fable between episodes of the road trip. By the end, Dondup has grown quietly closer to Sonam, and his certainty about leaving Bhutan has been shaken without being resolved. The film closes without confirming whether he boards the next bus westward or turns back.

Cast and production

The cast was drawn almost entirely from Bhutan, with most actors having no prior film experience. The lead role of Dondup was played by Tshewang Dendup, then best known as a radio broadcaster and producer with the Bhutan Broadcasting Service; he has since become one of the most recognisable figures in Bhutanese film. Sonam was played by Sonam Lhamo. Supporting roles were taken by Lhakpa Dorji, Deki Yangzom, Neten Chokling and others, with many minor parts cast from schoolchildren, farmers, civil servants and members of the Royal Bodyguard through open auditions.^[1]

Because Dzongkha is the mother tongue of only a portion of Bhutan's population — other communities speak Tshangla, Nepali and other languages — dialogue delivery was not automatic even for a local cast. The scholar and later politician Sonam Kinga, who also appears in the film, worked with the cast as a Dzongkha dialect coach.^[1]

Shooting took place in the districts of Bumthang, Trongsa and along the Lateral Road that links central Bhutan to Thimphu. The film makes extensive use of long takes, handheld walking shots and natural light. The score incorporates traditional Bhutanese and Himalayan musical elements, with contributions from the American composer David Hykes. The finished film runs approximately 108 minutes.^[5]

Themes

Reviewers and scholars have read Travellers and Magicians as a Buddhist meditation on desire, delivered in the form of a road movie. Dondup's fixation on America and Tashi's pursuit of another man's wife both dramatise the same idea: that longing to be somewhere other than where one is can become its own trap. The film does not condemn the wish to leave — Dondup's frustrations with village life are treated sympathetically — but it sets that wish beside the monk's quieter counter-proposal that attention, and not escape, might be the thing worth cultivating.^[6]

A second thread is the pressure of modernity on small traditional societies. The film was made at a moment when Bhutan was beginning to negotiate television (legalised in 1999), the internet and a widening outflow of educated young people — a pattern that would accelerate sharply in the following two decades, particularly with migration to Australia. Dondup's apple-picking fantasy anticipates that later wave.

The inner fable is also a reflection on the craft of storytelling itself. The monk uses narrative, not doctrine, to move Dondup — a technique with deep roots in Vajrayana teaching literature, where jataka tales and fable cycles have long been used to communicate ethical and contemplative points.

Release and reception

The film had its international premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2003, screening in the Upstream (Controcorrente) section, and it played at the Toronto International Film Festival the same month.^[2] It went on to screen at festivals including Tribeca, Deauville Asian, Sydney and Fresno Filmworks, and received a limited art-house release in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia through 2004 and 2005. Zeitgeist reported a U.S. theatrical gross of roughly US$668,000 across a 28-week run — modest in commercial terms but strong for a subtitled film from a country with no prior feature-film presence.^[1]

Reviewing the film for Variety from Venice, David Stratton praised the "natural and unaffected" performances and the use of Bhutanese landscape, describing the picture as a "minor but very easy-to-take road movie" and crediting the Australian and New Zealand post-production work for its clean finish.^[2] Writing for Screen Daily, Mike Goodridge welcomed the film as a modest, well-observed second feature from Khyentse Norbu and predicted a receptive art-house audience.^[7] Other critics, including reviewers at Time Out, noted that the nested story-within-a-story structure demanded patience and that the pacing would not suit viewers expecting a conventional drama.^[6]

Recorded festival honours include the audience award at the Deauville Asian Film Festival and the best emerging director award at the Asian American International Film Festival. It later received a silver medal for best feature film at the SAARC Film Festival in 2016.^[1]

Although the film is often informally described as Bhutan's Oscar submission, the Academy's own records and the Wikipedia list of Bhutanese submissions do not include it: Bhutan's first submission to the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film was The Cup at the 72nd Academy Awards, and the country's subsequent submissions were Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, The Monk and the Gun and I, the Song.^[4] Claims that Travellers and Magicians was an Academy submission should be treated with caution.

Significance for Bhutanese cinema

Before 2003 there was no Bhutanese feature-film industry to speak of. The first public cinema halls in Thimphu had opened only in the mid-1980s, and most content on their screens came from India. The Cup had been made by a Bhutanese director but shot in exile in India with Tibetan monks. Travellers and Magicians changed the template: a feature, in Dzongkha, shot inside Bhutan, with Bhutanese actors, playing at Venice and Toronto and then returning to local screens.

A domestic film sector emerged in its wake. Through the 2000s and 2010s small production companies in Thimphu began releasing Dzongkha-language features aimed primarily at the domestic market; by the 2010s Bhutan was producing around twenty to thirty features a year, according to the Film Association of Bhutan. Later internationally recognised Bhutanese films, including Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (2019, directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji, who had worked with Khyentse Norbu), built on the distribution networks and festival contacts first opened by Travellers and Magicians.^[8]

Khyentse Norbu continued to direct, releasing Vara: A Blessing in 2013, Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait in 2016 (shot in Bhutan and briefly withdrawn from domestic release after objections from religious authorities over its use of ritual masks outside ceremonial contexts), and Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache in 2019. Travellers and Magicians remains his most widely seen work and is regularly cited in scholarship on Buddhist cinema, slow cinema and Himalayan filmmaking.

Travellers and Magicians (film)

Background and director

Plot

Cast and production

Themes

Release and reception

Significance for Bhutanese cinema

See also

References

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