Happiness

Description

High in the snow-capped mountains of Bhutan, a mother leaves her son at a monastery to be raised as a monk. Peyangki would rather play than study, like most nine-year-old boys, and he is wont to slip away from the unpopulated cloister to turn cartwheels in his red tunic. While the wide-open outdoors is sufficient to distract the boy from the centuries-old routine of prayer and rituals, more sedentary (and, perhaps, deleterious) temptations encroach: Electricity is finally reaching the village, and with it television and the Internet. Now, modernization isn’t precisely the same thing as progress, for something is lost amid technological advances. Such is the wisdom of experience, which Peyangki has yet to acquire. When he accompanies his uncle on a journey to Thimphu to sell a yak and buy a TV, the lad is understandably thrilled, enticed and a tad confused by the manmade items he encounters in the capital, from mannequins to junk food. Back in the village, the eerily unilluminating light from the flickering fluorescent screen portends the end of a self-contained way of life. Does Peyangki realize the future is in the balance? The spare, eloquent imagery by director Thomas Balmès and director of photography Nina Bernfeld garnered the cinematography prize in the World Cinema Documentary competition at Sundance. –Michael Fox

Trailer

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