Something to watch tonight: Friday 7 February

The Monk and the Gun (Dorji, 2023)

I swear I won’t be using this news­let­ter to make daily veiled com­ments about cur­rent glob­al polit­ic­al events but when I saw that this delight­ful story about the birth of demo­cracy in the tiny nation of Bhutan was now gen­er­ally access­ible in Aotearoa, I felt like I needed to recom­mend it to you.

It screened in last year’s New Zealand International Film Festival along with a doc­u­ment­ary about Bhutan’s choice to pri­or­it­ise the meas­ure­ment of Gross National Happiness instead of Gross Domestic Product. That’s called Agent of Happiness and it’s not avail­able in New Zealand but can be streamed on SBS in Australia.

Much easi­er to fol­low – if only because the cent­ral premise is repeated often by vari­ous char­ac­ters – is this delight­ful movie about the birth of demo­cracy in Bhutan. In 2006, the king of this tiny Himalayan nation – real­ising that the mod­ern world could­n’t and should­n’t be kept at bay any longer – announced that he was step­ping down as abso­lute ruler and intro­du­cing par­lia­ment­ary democracy.

Pawo Choyning Dorji’s film is set dur­ing those early days when the people of Bhutan had to be taught how to vote. And why to vote. In 2006, elec­tion offi­cials are tour­ing the coun­try to run mock elec­tions, where the newly enfran­chised cit­izenry can prac­tice post­ing ballots.

But not every­one is happy at these devel­op­ments. Party polit­ics starts divid­ing fam­il­ies and com­munit­ies. A loc­al lama asks one of his monks to go and find a gun from some­where so that “things can be made right”. The only fire­arm to be found is an antique American Civil War rifle but it turns out that there’s also an American col­lect­or in town determ­ined to secure it for himself.

Utterly charm­ing, as slow mov­ing as you might ima­gine, but still deftly con­struc­ted, it was a pleas­ure to see demo­cracy not taken for gran­ted for a change.

Also fea­tured in that RNZ pre­view of the 2024 NZIFF: The Teacher’s Lounge, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, The Beast and Sasquatch Sunset.

Where to watch The Monk and the Gun

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from AroVision and others

Australia, Canada: Digital rental

Ireland, UK, India, : Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Hulu