Listener’s Tale

Listener’s Tale is the story of a triple journey. First, a journey in Sikkim. Next, a journey in time, tracing back the course of history from the birth of the kingdom of Sikkim and its people, the Lepchas. Finally, an initiatory journey, with art (painting, music, dance, architecture) and religion (Buddhism) as its main vectors. It is actually one and the same unreal, circular and majestic journey, within a web of materials, images, colours, sounds, texts and prayers, landscapes and objects, traces and dates, men, gods and places. With its tormented history of alliances, betrayals, invasions, liberations and prophecies, Sikkim is revealed, concealed, diffracted and celebrated. This story comes to us from various sources: the wind, rain, the humidity and mold on the mountain slopes, the babble of streams deep in the valleys and the branches’ wailing, the tankas now painted in workshops, the large frescoes with eroded colours on temple and cave walls, the lush vegetation, the stubble-burning on the site of the kingdom’s first capital, the monks’ prayers, the historian’s questions, the powerful protection of the “mountain goddess”. And finally from the filmmaker himself, in the eye of this storm. Multiple and fragmentary, unfinished and epic, it has no author, it doesn’t itself exist. Only someone who hears it can reconstitute its movement. (Yann Lardeau)