In 2008, the king of the small mountainous country of Bhutan, with a population of just under 800,000, abdicated and paved the way for a constitutional democracy. For the first time, the National Assembly was to consist of directly elected representatives. Director Pawo Choyning Dorji, whose debut LUNANA was the first Bhutanese film nominated for an Oscar in 2022, sets his gentle satire during the elections. The election commissioner travels across the country with her team in order to prepare the population for the event using trial elections. This isn’t an easy endeavor, because not everyone sees this change positively: the king is popular, and the people are happy with the status quo.

The pitfalls of the gift of democracy lead to all sorts of bizarre situations, such as when voter registration fails because no one had previously considered their date of birth to be important, or when the trial vote predominantly turns out for the "yellow" party - presumably because yellow is the color of the royal family. In this heated situation, the old Lama (played by a real Lama, Kelsang Choejey) decides that something needs to happen and tasks his assistant Tashi (Tandin Wangchuck) with get him two guns. That is tricky in the predominantly Buddhist country, where owning weapons is severely punished, and not only the viewers, but also all the people Tashi asks about a gun, wonder, "What does the Lama want with guns?"

The question holds together a film with individual plot lines that seem to run parallel to one another for a long time: while the election commissioner tries to convince the population of the new achievement called “democracy,” discord breaks out between the new groups in the village of Ura. Little Yuphel is bullied at school because her father supports the Industialization Party and not that of the village head. There’s someone else searching for weapons along with monk Tashi. A dubious American weapons dealer named Coleman (Harry Einhorn) believes there are ancient weapons in Ura from the US Civil War era and he is prepared to offer a lot of money for them.

At Bhutan's slow pace, Dorji weaves these stories into a mischievous tableau that, on the one hand, takes a look at a country in transition to democracy, industrialization and medialization (Bhutan was the last country in the world to introduce television in 1999), and, on the other hand, takes a friendly but firm swipe at those who consider themselves the avant-garde of modernity while at the same time worshipping deadly weapons and money, and trampling on truth and humanity in polarizing election campaigns. THE MONK AND THE GUN also reminds us that democracy is not a given, but must be cherished, cared for and valued by those who practice it. The well-orchestrated climax of the film, the ritual of the Lama in the evening before the election, brings all of the stories together, the alleged naivety of the rural population and the cynicism of the city and the West face each other in a final showdown and the question of what the Lama actually wants with the gun is finally answered.

Hendrike Bake

Translation: Elinor Lewy