Clouds of Unknowing: Buddhism and Bhutanese Cinema

This chapter illustrates how Buddhism's holistic perspective on what constitutes a dream and what constitutes reality impacts the way characters in Bhutanese film are presented. Instead of a hero with individual human subjectivity being the controlling force of the narrative, the ‘hero's’ journey is decentred as multiple realities. The cultural encounter of one of this chapter's authors — as a screenwriter and director from the ‘West’ working on a collaborative film project with Bhutanese partners — illustrates the way those Buddhist principles shape the trajectory in which a film story can go. Religion here is not approached as a system of belief per se, but as a cultural system — the focus is not so much on religious beliefs, but on the social and cultural dimensions that religions carry.