Written and directed by Dechen Roder and starring Tandin BidhaI, I, The Song (Mogi gsangbi zhabskhra) has such a compelling premise that it is aching for a remake in English and/or other languages.
Nima is a respected schoolteacher, and she has a loving boyfriend. But, without warning, her stable life collapses within minutes. She loses her job and her boyfriend because a sexually explicit video of her has spread rapidly on the internet. She cannot even walk down the street without people staring at her and giving her dirty looks. Except that it isn’t Nima in the video clip; it’s a doppelganger. Nima decides that the only way to restore her reputation is to track down the real woman in the video and convince her to go public.
When Nima finally views the video herself, she notices in the corner the sign of a bar, The Jewel Hotel and Bar in Gelephu, a small town on the border of India, a six-and-a half drive from where she works in the Bhutanese capital of Thimphu. So Nima goes there. She learns that the woman she is seeking is named Meto. She meets Meto’s ex-boyfriend, her former employer, her old friends and her grandmother. Nima learns that Meto changed from a hardworking woman to a woman of questionable character, and that the notorious video was uploaded to the internet without her consent.
Parts of the story are specifically Bhutanese, such as the unusual importance given to traditional music. Meto’s grandmother is half-blind and assumes the woman to whom she is speaking is really Meto. She pleads with Nima/Meto to bring back her song, which has been “stolen.” By this she means that it has been recorded as popular music. To Meto’s grandmother, this is a criminal act, which Nima realizes is not dissimilar to the criminal act of uploading the sex video that has ruined her own life.
Gradually, Nima’s voyage becomes a somewhat spiritual one in which she explores her own identity.
For the remake, I would drop the aspects of I, The Song that are Bhutanese, but this does not detract from the film itself.
