109 min | PG-13 | January 21, 2022 | Samuel Goldwyn Films
A burned-out young teacher who dreams of singing in Australia gets posted to the most remote school in the world, a glacial village in the Bhutanese highlands. He arrives wanting to quit. The mountain has other plans.
Ugyen Dorji is a reluctant teacher in Bhutan finishing out a government contract he never wanted. He wants to move to Australia and become a singer. The state sends him instead to Lunana, a village of fifty-six people perched at the top of the Himalayas, a week of walking from the nearest road. The setup looks like a standard fish-out-of-water arc. What the film is actually about is the difference between the life you imagine and the life that is asking for you.
Sherab Dorji plays Ugyen with a sullen modern detachment that the village slowly wears down. He scrolls a dead phone and sulks through the first act, and the performance earns the thaw rather than rushing it. Pem Zam plays the class captain, a child of the village, with a directness that no trained actor could fake. She knocks on his door at dawn and announces that the children are waiting, and the whole film tilts on her face. Kelden Lhamo Gurung plays Saldon, the yak herder whose songs explain why these people stay where the air is thin and the winters kill.
Pawo Choyning Dorji writes and directs his first feature using the actual residents of Lunana as his cast. He shot at over fifteen thousand feet with solar panels charging the camera batteries because the village has no grid. The cinematography refuses postcard prettiness and instead holds long static frames of fog, stone, and dung-fueled fires until the altitude becomes a physical fact. The recurring yak that wanders into the classroom is a real animal, and Dorji lets it stand there as both joke and argument about what belongs.
The film moves exactly where you expect it to move. The cynic learns the value of the simple life and the children teach the teacher. Dorji knows the shape is familiar and trusts the specificity of the place to carry it anyway. The closing turn complicates the easy lesson by refusing to pretend that wonder cancels ambition, and that honesty is what lifts the film above its own sweetness.