Report New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film Volume 5 Number 1 © 2007 Intellect Ltd. Report. English language. doi: 10.1386/ncin.5.1.75/4 Film-making in Bhutan: The view from Shangri-La Sue Clayton Royal Holloway, University of London Abstract Bhutan until the last decade drastically restricted its contact with the outside world, and recent media interest has focussed only on Bhutan’s late reception of global satellite TV and the Internet. To date there has been no scholarly account of its indigenous DV film industry; one that has produced nearly a hundred feature- length films, none of which have yet been screened outside Bhutan. The author of this report has had unique access to the country and, as a screenwriter and direc- tor herself, has by working in collaboration with Bhutanese colleagues gained added insights into the creative and practical dilemmas faced by film-makers there. She also highlights areas of concern to film theorists with regard to questions of spectatorship, as well as narrative strategies around the notion of the dream. Present-day perceptions of Bhutan Until 1999, the Western world paid little attention to the small Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan in the eastern Himalayas. As well as its geographical remoteness, Bhutan was isolated politically as first its ally Tibet was annexed by the Chinese (1949–1951), and then the neighbouring inde- pendent kingdom of Sikkim was subsumed into India (1975). The govern- ment of Bhutan also discouraged foreign visitors, and culturally the country’s existence only sporadically impinged on us through texts such as James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which first coined the term ‘Shangri-La’ to connote a remote, lost paradise. 1 However, inside Bhutan since the mid-1990s there have been moves to engage with global culture, culminating in the country’s becoming, in 1999, the last on earth to receive international satellite TV, negotiating a 48-channel satellite package, which included CNN, MTV and a variety of Hollywood and Bollywood movie channels. This event cued a spate of world press coverage, which opined that sudden access to global electronic media would spell ‘trouble in paradise’ in a stable society that, on its outward surface, seemed to retain essentially feudal characteristics (David 1999; Scott-Clark and Levy 2003). This coverage overlooked two important points. Firstly, that Bhutan is not a passive victim of new media as they suggest: The introduction of these media and their likely effects has been, 1 Lost Horizon was later adapted into the 1937 Frank Capra film of the same name. 75 NCJCF 5 (1) 75–89 © Intellect Ltd 2007 Keywords Bhutan emerging cinemas South East Asian cinema spectatorship narrative strategies dreams screenwriting independent film-making