Director: Dechen Roder
Country: Bhutan
Year: 2017
The traditional three-year, three-month, and three-day retreat—known as lo sum choe sum by the Bhutanese—is an advanced and intensive meditation practice undertaken by Buddhist monks, nuns, and other devout practitioners. By withdrawing from the world and worldly distractions for a lengthy period of time, practitioners are able to focus on cultivating higher states of insight, wisdom, and clarity, opening themselves to the possibility of deep transformation. In director Dechen Roder’s brief but brooding work of fiction, Lhamo, a young, wounded girl from Bhutan, faces the harsh gaze of the world in an attempt to find her own form of retreat and redemption.