{"id":26191,"date":"2020-12-30T01:00:46","date_gmt":"2020-12-29T16:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/film\/2020\/dec\/29\/sing-me-a-song-review-documentary-bhutan"},"modified":"2020-12-30T01:00:46","modified_gmt":"2020-12-29T16:00:46","slug":"sing-me-a-song-review-sombre-bhutanese-internet-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=26191","title":{"rendered":"Sing Me a Song review \u2013 sombre Bhutanese internet love story"},"content":{"rendered":"

French documentarian Thomas Balm\u00e8s checks in with the Himalayan monk he filmed back in 2013 to find him addicted to online romance<\/p>\n

In 2013, French documentary-maker Thomas Balm\u00e8s made a film called Happiness<\/a>, about an eight-year-old monk called Peyangki in the remote Himalayan village of Laya in Bhutan \u2013 and how this boy was responding to the astounding novelties of TV and the internet. Now seven years later, Balm\u00e8s has returned to Laya and to Peyangki, who has grown to young adulthood in this brave new digital world.<\/p>\n

What Balm\u00e8s has chanced upon now are not simply more instances of how the web has opened or closed that innocent mind: he gives us a sad and sombre love story from the globalised 21st century. Basically, Peyangki is now regularly neglecting his religious studies and is addicted to his smartphone and to the web, though arguably no more so than any other young person in the developed world. And in particular he is into the Chinese video service WeChat, through which he is regularly talking to a woman called Ugyen, apparently a bar hostess in Bhutan\u2019s capital, Thimphu, who sings songs for him.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

French documentarian Thomas Balm\u00e8s checks in with the Himalayan monk he filmed back in 2013 to find him addicted to online romanceIn 2013, French documentary-maker Thomas Balm\u00e8s made a film called Happiness, about an eight-year-old monk called Peyangki…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":863,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1786,71,707,69,61,852,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bhutan","category-culture","category-documentary-films","category-film","category-south-and-central-asia","category-world-cinema","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/863"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26192,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26191\/revisions\/26192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}