Honeygiver Among The Dogs

She is said to be incredibly beautiful and a true demoness. What the policeman Kinley hears about the subject of his investigation, the mysterious Choden, piques his curiosity. His boss has sent him to the Bhutanese district of Bumthang to investigate the disappearance of a religious leader. In the eyes of the narrow-minded locals, the newcomer Choden has long been identified as the prime suspect. Kinley, armed with a mobile phone and stoic disbelief in the spiritual circus of his surroundings, encounters her on a bus. But it is not he, the diligently objective undercover investigator, who approaches the woman: she speaks to him and completely throws him off balance with her parables of goddesses and animals. The jaw harp sets the beat for the first Bhutanese film noir, whose ingredients – a mysterious woman, an investigator increasingly tormented by doubts – are vigorously swirled together by Bhutanese director Dechen Roder in her feature film debut, navigating the terrain between tradition and modernity, religion and rationality. It is an idiosyncratic, feminist interpretation of the genre, not only because in the mountains of Bhutan the men wear skirts and knee-length socks.