Urgan, the boy monk of the Himalaya: documentary follows a nine-year-old's journey to the monastery

At nine, Urgan has never seen anything beyond the village of Tangyer, at 3,800 meters, in the Nubra Valley of Ladakh, in the northern Indian Himalaya, open to visitors only since 1993. Buddhist traditions have always been followed there, among them the custom that the youngest son of each family becomes a monk, or lama. In January the boy leaves his family for the monastery. Urgan, Child of the Himalaya, by Corinne Glowacki and Philippe Bigot, produced by ZED in 2003, records the journey.

The road to the monastery

To get there, one must cross the Wori La pass, at 5,000 meters. Urgan makes the trip with his uncle, a caravaneer taking yaks to sell for Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and later with his cousin Norbou, 19. The channel's description says that over several days they have "unexpected, fascinating and sometimes unsettling" spiritual encounters, a path "toward enlightenment." What those encounters are is not stated in the description.

What the film lets you see

Without a transcript, what can be said is the film's frame: a child facing a tradition that decides his fate, the winter cold, the isolation and the company of three generations of one family. It is an account of a religious custom, not a study of Tibetan Buddhism; those wanting historical context should look to other sources, and the Nubra Valley itself has encyclopedia entries.

Watching it

The film runs about 53 minutes, is spoken in Spanish (on the SLICE Iberia channel, which presents it as a "complete documentary") and offers no manual subtitles in another language. What remains is the question the film leaves to the viewer: what it means, for a child and for his family, to have a vocation that is also an obligation.