Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait
The dazzling new film from Bhutanese lama and filmmaker Khyentse Norbu (The Cup, Travellers and Magicians) chronicles a sacred jungle ritual whose masked, anonymous participants seek after complete self-knowledge — or descend into thievery, violation, and murder.
Khyentse Norbu
Khyentse Norbu
Casts & Crew
Tshering Dorji
Sadon Lhamo
Thinley Dorji
Tony Leung Chiu-Wai
Zhou Xun
Tshewang Dendup
Tenzin Dolma
Jamyang Dorji
Jigme Drukpa
Xin Liang
Rinchen Namgayel
Pema Namtruel
Gomchen Pema
Tandin Sonam
Kelsang Tobgay
Also Directed by Khyentse Norbu
While the soccer World Cup is being played in France, two young Tibetan refugees arrive at a monastery/boarding school in exile in India. Its atmosphere of serene contemplation is disrupted by soccer fever, the chief instigator being a young student, the soccer enthusiast Orgyen who desperately seeks a TV to watch the final.
In Year 2118, set in a Buddhist monastery on the ‘Kathmandu Valley beachfront’, Norbu imagines what impact the passage of a century might have on Buddhist teaching practices.
A young government official, named Dondup, who is smitten with America (he even has a denim gho) dreams of escaping there while stuck in a beautiful but isolated village. He hopes to connect in the U.S. with a visa out of the country. He misses the one bus out of town to Thimphu, however, and is forced to hitchhike and walk along the Lateral Road to the west, accompanied by an apple seller, a Buddhist monk with his ornate, dragon-headed dramyin, a drunk, a widowed rice paper maker, and his beautiful daughter, Sonam.
In a small Indian village, Lila is learning to dance from her mother, Devadasi, a Bharatanatyam dancer. She falls in love with low class Shyam, who dreams of becoming a sculptor. Shyam asks Lila to model for him as he sculpts a goddess, and the two become very close. However, their relationship is discovered by the village chief Subha, and Lila decides to sacrifice her happiness for her mother and Shyam.
When an ambitious, skeptical young entrepreneur faces strange portents of impending death, he is thrust into a mystical world of ancient wisdom and traditional beliefs that points to a special woman as his only hope for life.