What can be said of a person who—in the act of trying to conceal himself with a mask—reveals who he really is? I first tackled that conundrum when studying Dionysos, the Greek god of wine and ecstasy, whose association with masks symbolized transformation and religious fervor. Masks in his cults and in Greek theatre, which he patronized, allowed wearers to assume new identities, from human to animal or from one gender to another, enabling a state of uninhibited behavior. Not to argue too much a case for cultural diffusion, but it also interests me that Hellenistic culture was transmitted to the region of Gandhara in ancient India, accounting for how Buddhist art has incorporated Dionysian imagery and narrative forms.
In his fourth film Hema Hema: Sing Me A Song While I Wait (2016) Bhutanese director and Buddhist Lama Khyentse Norbu continued developing the Buddhist cinema he almost single-handedly created. His filmic practice began with consultative work for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993), followed six years later by his first feature film The Cup (1999); Travelers & Magicians (2003), the first full-length feature film shot in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan; and Vara: A Blessing (2013). All four films have strong festival pedigree as arthouse darlings. Hema Hema premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2016, made its festival rounds, and is finally being released theatrically by New York-based Dekanalog on Friday, August 8, 2025 at the Quad Cinema.
“Hema Hema” means “once upon a time” in native Dzongkha language and the English subtitle refers to a bardo state, a waiting room where departed souls pass before entering their next incarnation. Every twelve years an elder selects individuals to attend a ritual ceremony lasting a lunar cycle where they’re taught the concept of the bardo as they “prepare for the gap between death and birth”. Said preparation involves shedding one’s notion of identity by delving into the realm of anonymity, achieved through a required use of masks.
As articulated by Italian film critic Lorenzo Paci at Cinepaxy, the mask is “a device for establishing a community of anonymous individuals, without subjection or individuality, but also a mask to protect oneself from oneself, from one's own identity. Thus, one enters a role-playing game where the stakes are one's own life and that of others; one conforms to an otherness regardless of what one was, almost as if the ritual were a path to resurrection in another life, a chance to recreate oneself and escape the constant obligation of recognizing oneself. There is no longer any need to conform one's being to an identity, one's essence to matter; conforming to a precept means, in a certain sense, excluding it, denying it by subjecting oneself to it, in this case, reshaping oneself with a new consistency.”
“Anonymity is intoxicating,” the ceremonial elder teaches. “Anonymity is power. If you give away your identity, you give a way to power.” Donning masks, becoming faceless, allows the participants to be lascivious, playful and daring. Identity is understood to be a form of death and anonymity a rebirth. The narrative grip of the past, the thirst for fame and respect, are understood as the identity the ceremonial participants are tasked to relinquish. At HighOnFilms, Nafees Ahmed extrapolates that people are “bucketing along to make our identity unique; donning ‘masks’ when required to make it possible in a world besieged by modern technology. Our virtual social presence matters the most. We have let these technologies define our life. We fear anonymity so much that our real self is lost while doing so.” Slaying this “earned” identity, Ahmed suggests, is what “lies at the heart of this spiritual elevating film.” Adriana Rosati furthers at AsianMoviePulse that, indeed, Norbu gained inspiration from chat rooms and social medias where users feel freedom of action behind the anonymity of their screens.
So I return to the conundrum originally posed. What if the anonymity that allegedly allows you to escape your identity, that essentially conceals it, actually results in unleashing it, revealing it, in dark, unexpected ways? What if the wisdom of a Buddhist teaching promoting rebirth becomes another form of death? As stated in their program note, Quad Cinema writes: “The Bhutanese lama and filmmaker, recognized by Tibetan Buddhists as the third incarnation of the founder of Khyentse lineage, imbues his films with a rare spiritual wisdom—though not at the expense of the traditional movie-going pleasures of spectacle, character, and suspense.”
Though the usage of masks in this film are not inherently Buddhist in practice, they fascinate; either through the inscrutable and expressionless mask of our main protagonist, as compared to the brightly painted, if garish, masks of other participants (some of the masks are hundreds of years old). Cinematographer Jigme Tenzing creates a vibrant palette of oranges and reds amidst the verdant greens of the southeastern locations in Bhutan, then switches to blues in the film’s urban scenes where the anonymity of dancers in a club rhymes with the ritual dances at the ceremonial retreat. The urban scenarios that bookend the film are also the ones that provoke the most unease, causing lingering ruminations on how beautiful teachings might be impossible to practice in our modern world of earned identities.
