His Holiness Khyentse Norbu wrote and directed four award-winning films, The Cup (1999), Travellers and Magicians (2003), Vara: A Blessing (2013), and Hema Hema: Sing Me A Song While I Wait (2016).
Travellers and Magicians was the first feature film to be produced in Bhutan. He studied filmmaking with Bernardo Bertolucci, after serving as consultant on the Italian director's 1993 film Little Buddha. Khyentse Norbu also appears in the 2009 documentary Tulku, where he discusses Buddhism and his views on the tulku phenomenon.
Vara: The Blessing (2013) opened South Korea's famed Busan International Film Festival.
His film Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait, premiered at the Locarno Festival in 2016. It also screened at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, where it received an honourable mention from the Platform Prize jury. The movie, which tells its story by following a mysterious ritual in the forest where all participants are masked, was praised by critics for "its portrayal of complex Buddhist themes like transgression, by juxtaposing them on to modern topics like anonymity on the Internet.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
His Holiness Khyentse Norbu Rinpoche was born in eastern Bhutan in 1961 at a place called Khenpajong. At the age of seven he was recognized, by His Holiness Sakya Trizin, as the third incarnation of the founder of Khyentse lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.
