Honeygiver Among the Dogs

They say she’s incredibly beautiful and a real female demon. The things that Kinley, a cop, hears about the mysterious Choden who is the subject of his investigations are making him very curious. His boss has sent him to the Bhutanese district of Bumthang to look into the disappearance of a religious leader. In the eyes of the narrow-minded locals, newcomer Choden has long been a prime suspect. Armed with his mobile phone and his stoic disbelief in all the spiritual claptrap going on around him, Kinley meets her on a bus. But it’s not this deliberately sober undercover cop who approaches her, but she who speaks to him - and promptly throws him completely off balance with all her metaphors about goddesses and animals. The twangs of a Jew’s harp set the pace for Bhutan’s first film noir, the ingredients of which – a strange woman and an investigator increasingly plagued by doubt – are given a jolly good stir by Bhutanese director Dechen Roder in her first feature-length film. The resulting work is a blend of tradition and modernity, religion and rational thought; an idiosyncratic, feminist interpretation of a genre – and not just because Bhutanese men wear skirts and knee-high socks.