BHUTAN SPECIAL

ARA PALANG  director: pelden Dorji

Ara Palang is a short fiction film, which exposes the strong culture of drinking alcohol in Bhutan. Without being preachy, it shows how engrained alcohol is in our culture, even to the ruin of society and family.

DIRECTOR-Pelden Dorji, a veteran film maker, started his career as a camera man.  He was working with Kuensel Corporation as a camera man when his passion for movie production grew stronger.He quit his job and started producing movies under the banner Pelvision Audio Visuals. The first movie produced by Pelden Dorji is a tear jerking family drama, Pha-Ma.

BIRDS IN CAGES  director: karma deki

 Birds in Cages is a story of two intimate friends, Dechen and Pema, both afflicted by hardships throughout their life.
Dechen comes from a poor family whose father has left leaving an alcoholic mother and two siblings for her to look after. She works towards earning a living and hopes for education one day. Unfortunately she finds herself at crossroads where she has to choose between her education and her family’s survival.

 DIRECTOR- Karma Deki worked as a postal clerk in Thimphu until she received an opportunity to enroll at NYFA, where she studied directing and film production for one year. Her feature film Kishutara won best film award in the Bhutanese national film awards in 2008. She has made more than 3 feature films, many of which have won awards or screened at international festivals.  She recently screened her short film Birds in Cages at the South Asian film festival in Goa, India.

A FORGOTTEN STORY director: tashi gyeltshen

A short,  a forgotten story is in general a story of a victim of its own tragedy. But the story is told symbolically taking “jamjee”, a container for suja (traditional butter tea), as a victim being pushed to obscure life after being replaced by a modern and more glamorous teapot. As we are aware, jamjee is used less compared to before the invasion of different teas (foreign cultures). However, at the human level, it’s about a life somewhere that has ended which I, as a fellow human being, do not even know. What does the suicide mean to me which I am not even aware of? For me, I can grasp it as a tragedy only when I know of it. A river, with or without the lament, knows only how to flow.

SOUND OF TIME director: pema tshering

The film is about one man’s quest to immerse himself in a pure and fleeting moment of peace. In a comtemporary world surrounded by modern stimuli and sound how does one find oneself?

 

 

THE CONTAINER director: jamyang dorji

Set in Bhutan in 1980 and inspired by true events, this is a story of a mother’s devotion to her child, as she travels a great distance from her poor, remote community to get some medicine from a small    hospital for her very ill baby.

In a cruel twist of fate she learns that even though the medicine is provided free by the government, she must supply a container to hold the precious liquid. She doesn’t have a bottle and can’t afford to buy one.

The search for a container begins….