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. He credits Dorji’s two prior features for drawing him further in. 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. 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. Dorji ties that symbolism directly to the science of glacial retreat.
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. He has described the experience in visceral terms.
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. 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.
Ma also frames the collaboration as a two-way exchange.
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