Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom review – heart and feet-warming tale of a Bhutan village

This gentle, sweet-natured movie is the debut feature from Bhutan-born and US-educated film-maker Pawo Choyning Dorji: last year it became the first Bhutanese film to get an Oscar nomination for best international feature (losing out to Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car). Despite these unusual credentials, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom runs on pretty familiar, even traditional lines, although its likability and humour – and almost childlike faith in the power of singing to overcome melancholy and adversity – means you’ll find yourself smiling along.

Ugyen (Sherab Dorji) is a young man in the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu; since his parents’ death, he lives with his formidable grandmother who is exasperated at his aimlessness and shiftlessness. He is four years into a five-year teacher training course, but only wants to hang out with his girlfriend and other friends, and nurtures a dream to go out to Australia and make it as a singer. But a stern government official informs him that he must do a season teaching at the village school of Lunana in the country’s mountainous north-west. It’s the most remote school anywhere in the world, she tells him, with lipsmacking satisfaction. Ugyen whines that he has an “altitude problem”. More like an attitude problem, snaps the official. Like it or not, he’s going.

So our pampered, resentful hero finds that his big-city pop-music dreams must be put on hold. After a long and uncomfortable bus journey, Ugyen is met by heartbreakingly polite and respectful village representatives and told that the rest of the journey will be on foot: a nice walk along a river, they assure him. It is, of course, a punishing hike that goes on for ever, mostly uphill, in the course of which he ponders the progressive disappearance of snow and ice on the mountain peaks, owing to climate change. But this uphill walk is a parable for humility and patience.

And inevitably, after a rocky start, and acting on some level as a single samurai to fight for the villagers against the marauding forces of ignorance, Ugyen grows to love them all, and even, perhaps, a certain young woman in the village: Saldon (Kelden Lhamo Gurung) who sings by herself in the countryside. Ugyen wants to light fires to warm himself and is cheerfully told that the way to do this is to light the yak dung, of which there is a great deal. The village elders even provide him with his own yak in the classroom for necessary material, as well as general morale-raising.

It is, perhaps, a movie machine-tooled for audiences outside Bhutan and despite early talk of the children being educated for a life beyond what they would traditionally expect, we don’t get that much discussion of how things might change for them or for the village. Yet there is something winning in this calm, walking-pace drama – and the landscape is amazing.