The Cup (1999)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Cup opens on a small, poor monastery in exile, where two novice monks care more about the 1998 World Cup final than about their studies. That premise sounds like comedy, and much of the film plays as comedy, but its real subject is what monastic life looks like from the inside when nobody is performing it for an outside camera. Khyentse Norbu, the film's writer and director, is not an outsider dramatizing a tradition he studied for the occasion. He was recognised at age seven, by Sakya Trizin, as the third incarnation of the founder of the Khyentse lineage within the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism, and he cast the film almost entirely with real monks rather than professional actors, among them Orgyen Tobgyal and Neten Chokling in the lead roles.

That authorship shows in what the film does not do. It never treats the monastery as a museum piece or its rules as an already perfected state its characters simply obey. A Tricycle review by Dimitri Ehrlich, published the following spring, describes the film's own attitude plainly: monks are human too, and the monastic code is a goal to be worked toward rather than a finished condition.

The setting carries its own history. The Cup was shot on location in Bir, a Tibetan refugee settlement in Himachal Pradesh, India, among a community built by people who fled Chinese occupation of Tibet. Ehrlich's review reads the film's gentle generational friction, between elder lamas and football minded younger monks, as more poignant for that reason: ordinary daily life, humor included, maintained precisely because it was forced from the place that used to hold it without question.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Cup reached theaters on August 29, 1999, the directorial debut of Khyentse Norbu, who by then had already spent most of his life carrying out his responsibilities as a major lineage holder in the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism. Rather than hire actors to play monks, he cast the film with actual residents of the Chokling monastery in Bir, Himachal Pradesh, among them Orgyen Tobgyal and Neten Chokling, and shot it on that location rather than a constructed set. The result was, by the reviews that met it, unusually unforced: Roger Ebert awarded it three stars and remarked on its distinctly observational sense of comic timing, while the BBC called it an immensely likeable and engaging work filled with genuine humour. It holds an eighty five percent approval score on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

The production carried real weight for Bhutan, the country where Khyentse Norbu was born: The Cup was Bhutan's first ever submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, four years before his own Travellers and Magicians became the first feature film actually produced inside Bhutan. Neither source consulted for this entry records any objection from within Tibetan Buddhist communities to the film, a different reception history from the controversy that met other traditions' dramatizations elsewhere in this atlas.

What the film offers is authorship from inside the tradition it depicts. His subsequent career, including Travellers and Magicians in 2003 and Vara: A Blessing in 2013, has continued in the same vein: work made by a recognised teacher rather than about one.