Tashi Gyeltshen

Tashi Gyeltshen (born 1972) is a Bhutanese writer-director, screenwriter and former journalist. He is known internationally for his debut feature The Red Phallus (2018), which premiered at the Busan International Film Festival, won the festival's FIPRESCI Prize and was subsequently selected for the Generation 14plus section of the 69th Berlin International Film Festival in 2019. He works in Dzongkha and his films are typically set in rural Bhutan, dealing with gender, family authority and the strains of social change in small valley communities.^[1]

Gyeltshen is a self-taught filmmaker, having entered cinema in his late thirties after a career in print journalism. He worked for the national newspaper Kuensel and for Bhutan Times before being dismissed and turning to film, beginning with short work and progressing to feature production through a sequence of grants, lab residencies and Berlinale Talents participation.^[2]

His work is sometimes grouped with that of Dechen Roder as part of a generation of Bhutanese filmmakers whose international visibility followed but is distinct from Khyentse Norbu's earlier Buddhist-cinema lineage, with a stronger focus on social-realist subjects and a willingness to take on contested domestic themes such as gender violence and rural poverty.^[3]

Background and Journalism Career

Gyeltshen was born in 1972. In interviews he has said that he originally wanted to be a poet but did not consider his writing strong enough to pursue, and instead moved into journalism. He worked for Kuensel, Bhutan's national newspaper, and later for Bhutan Times, before being dismissed after a dispute with an editor. He has described teaching himself filmmaking afterwards as an isolated process, working from books and online materials in the absence of a film school in Bhutan.^[2]

Films

Gyeltshen has described his short and feature work as a loose "red trilogy", with each title built around the colour red as a structuring image:

• Girl with a Red Sky (2009) — short film, his first directorial work.
• The Red Door (2014) — short film, his second.
• The Red Phallus (2018) — debut feature, an international co-production between Bhutan, Germany and Nepal in Dzongkha. It follows Sangay, a sixteen-year-old daughter of a wood-carver of ritual phalli in a small western Bhutanese town, and her involvement with a married butcher. The film premiered at the Busan International Film Festival on 6 October 2018, won the FIPRESCI Prize at the festival, and was selected for the Generation 14plus competition at the Berlinale in February 2019.^[1]

Gyeltshen has said that he chose not to release The Red Phallus in Bhutan after the country's censor board demanded the removal of approximately twelve minutes of footage. The film was distributed internationally by the Hong Kong-based Asian Shadows.^[4]

Style and Themes

Critics writing for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Cineuropa have noted Gyeltshen's slow, formally composed style, with extended takes, restrained dialogue and an emphasis on landscape and weather. Reviewers have also pointed to his interest in patriarchal authority, sexual coercion and the limits placed on young women in tightly bounded rural communities — concerns that The Red Phallus raises against the contrasting iconography of the phallus as a fertility and protection symbol elsewhere in Bhutanese folk religion.^[4]

His selection for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards Academy and for Berlinale Talents has placed him within a regional network of South and Southeast Asian filmmakers working outside large national industries, alongside other Bhutanese, Nepali and Bangladeshi directors who depend on co-production and festival circulation rather than domestic theatrical release.^[5]

References

1. The Red Phallus — Wikipedia
2. Tashi Gyeltshen interview — Easternkicks
3. Review: The Red Phallus — Cineuropa
4. Film Review: The Red Phallus — Variety
5. The Red Phallus — Berlinale Talents Project
6. The Red Phallus: Film Review — The Hollywood Reporter (Busan 2018)