During the month of August and in collaboration with the Locarno International Film Festival’s Open Doors initiative, Filmatique will host a collection of films from new talents in Southeast Asia.
The Monk
Rescued from the streets of Yangon as a boy, Zawana is now an adolescent living in a rural monastery in Myanmar.
Though his abbot U Dahma has become ill and the monastery, like the surrounding community, fallen into victim to poverty and hardship, Zawana is in the midst of a crisis of faith— he remains unsure whether the path of the monk is right for him.
Temptation arrives in the form of a local girl, as do modern conveniences like a borrowed MP3 player. Meanwhile Zawana becomes responsible for taking the man who rescued him back to the bright lights of contemporary Yangon.
The Monk is a naturalistic meditation on identity, existence and faith inside the rarely-seen, hermetic world of Myanmar, shown through the eyes of a young man on the brink of adulthood. The first independent feature from Myanmar in 50 years, Maw Naing’s feature film debut premiered at Karlovy Vary, Jihlava, Sakhalin and Singapore.
Some years ago, we had these « fake » monks in Malaysia tricking public for money.