Йо-Йо Ма и пао Чойнинг Дорджи представили фильм «Песнь для снежного льва» на фестивале в Теллурайд

Legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Bhutanese auteur Pawo Choyning Dorji are heading to the Telluride Film Festival with “A Song for the Snow Lion,” a 21-minute short built around a Himalayan folktale about vanishing glaciers. Variety is unveiling the film’s first trailer. Dorji’s “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” earned Bhutan’s first Oscar nomination, for best international feature film, and “The Monk and the Gun,” which was shortlisted in the same category but did not go on to a nomination. Ma had wanted to visit Bhutan for years before the project came together. “I have always wanted to go to Bhutan, to meet its people, hear their stories, see the glaciers, and witness how they feed the mighty rivers that course through some of the most populous countries in the world,” Ma says. He credits Dorji’s two prior features for drawing him further in. “Meeting Pawo was serendipitous,” Ma says. “I loved watching the poetry of his filmic storytelling in ‘Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom’ and ‘The Monk and the Gun.'” Popular on Variety The film itself grew out of a request from Ma, who approached Dorji wanting to collaborate on something addressing global warming and the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers. Ma had first proposed a music video. Dorji says he pushed instead for a short film built around a folktale he had grown up with, in which snow lions, mythical guardians of the mountains, are said to live wherever glaciers survive. “A Bhutanese child does not learn to protect the mountain by being shown a chart,” Dorji says. “She learns it because she is told a snow lion lives up there.” “A Song for the Snow Lion” continues a thread Dorji has followed since his debut: the modernization drama of “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” and the political satire of “The Monk and the Gun” both examined what changes as Bhutan opens to the world. “It’s the same question I am returning to, of what we stand to lose, except this time the answer isn’t in our hands,” Dorji says. “Our glaciers are melting away regardless of what we choose.” For Dorji, the folktale carries a meaning that took him years to see. He read the glaciers as symbols of purity of action and the snow lion as the awakened mind that rises from them, a way of thinking he traces back to his own return trips to Bhutan’s Lunana Valley. “As the little girl in ‘A Song for the Snow Lion’ tells us, to tell a story in Bhutan is to untie a knot,” Dorji says, describing that impulse to free the knots people carry within themselves as the reason he keeps returning to Bhutanese storytelling. Dorji ties that symbolism directly to the science of glacial retreat. “The glacier and the folktale are bound in exactly that way,” he says. “The snow lion lives where the glaciers are. When the glacier goes, the snow lion has nowhere left to live, and the story that taught us to revere the mountain goes with it.” Shooting took the production into Lunana at elevations above 5,500 meters (18,100 feet), a remote valley reachable only by a 14-day trek from the nearest road and powered entirely by solar batteries. Dorji says the difficulty of reaching the location was part of the point. “In Bhutan, the hardship of reaching a sacred place is part of what makes the offering an offering,” he says. “You do not receive the blessing of a mountain by arriving comfortably.” Ma, who suffered altitude sickness during the shoot, still performed the film’s climactic cello piece alongside Bhutanese folk singer Kelden Lhamo. He has described the experience in visceral terms. “It was a life-changing experience, spending time with Pawo, meeting Kelden and performing with her at 18,000 feet, looking down at glacial lakes, imagining the torrential rush of water they could unleash,” Ma says. Just after that scene wrapped, a glacier cracked in the distance and collapsed into the water below, a sound the production’s team caught and worked into the film’s closing moments. “We had gone up there to make an offering to something we were told lives in the ice,” Dorji says. “The ice answered.” Ma has said the film’s central metaphor extends beyond any single glacier. “Thinking about water helps me understand that we are not separate from the earth and that our survival and the health of the planet are one,” Ma says. “It is literal – we are more than half water – but it is also cultural. The flows of human history, of trade and ideas, conflict and creation, trace water: glaciers, rivers, deltas, oceans. Like music, water travels lightly, it knows no borders.” Ma connects that idea to recent flooding in Nepal. “The tragedy in Nepal last month is a reminder of the stakes, for the region and for the world, a warning of nature’s capacity to be terrifyingly destructive,” Ma says, adding that he hopes the film also offers “a celebration of our ability to create song and story, awe and wonder that bind us together in love and responsibility when words and facts fail.” Working in a short form after two features changed Dorji’s approach on set, he says. “Every shot had to carry more than one thing at once, the landscape had to be the character, the song had to be the theme,” he says. Ma also frames the collaboration as a two-way exchange. “The kind of musical interaction I experienced with Kelden has been the engine of music’s evolution from the beginning,” Ma says. “You hear a song, it speaks to you, you make it yours.” Dorji says his hope for the film is a modest one: “If the film leads even one person to care a little more about the earth we live on, then I will be a content and happy filmmaker.” “A Song for the Snow Lion” also features 10-year-old Kinley Karma Lhazing, from a Lunana yak-herding family. Watch the trailer here: