When Taiwan-based filmmaker Pawo Choyning Dorji’s first film “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was accepted by the London Film Festival, he made connections around the world, from French and Swiss investors to Hollywood, as he tirelessly promoted the film, which wound up the first Bhutanese film submitted for the Oscar.
It marked the first Oscar nomination for the tiny, long-isolated Buddhist country of Bhutan, which became the world’s last country to open itself to television and the Internet in 1999.
With so few films produced in the small mountain country, his second film “The Monk and the Gun,” made with more actors and a bigger budget, was also submitted this year.The movie, which debuted at Telluride, is a culture-clash story about a lama who wants his monk to find him a gun in time for the full moon, which is in four days.
At the same time,…
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