Pawo Choyning Dorji and his crew had a mountain to climb to shoot their Oscar-nominated movie set in a remote school in Bhutan
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“He could have been a doctor or someone who goes up to measure the melting glaciers, but I made him a teacher because I wanted to touch upon real challenging issues that are impacting Bhutan right now,” Dorji says. “Teaching is the one profession that has the most number of people who quit. We might want to ignore this issue, but we have this problem. And veneration of the teacher is important in Buddhism.
“But I feel like all these challenges made us more meticulous, because we knew we didn’t have that safety blanket. If we were missing a certain shot we couldn’t say, ‘Let’s go back out.’ This was a small film to tell the story of my country. Back then I had no idea where it would go. I used to joke with the crew that, even if this film fails, we can take pride that we made a film that had a zero carbon footprint.
The Dzongkha-language film was nominated for best international feature last year, at the 94th Academy Awards. It almost missed out making it that far, first because Bhutan produces so few movies that it no longer had an Oscar-nominating committee, and then because the academy’s website recognised neither the country nor its language.
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