Chinese filmmaker tells story of child monks in Nepal – they fight, swear and are addicted to cellphones

Hopakuli watches Bollywood films on his phone, dreams of becoming a monster-bashing superhero and aspires to make more money than a bank vault could hold. It would seem that the five-year-old has a lot in common with his peers, but he is no ordinary child: the Tibetan is a novice monk who lives in Lumbini, a small, sleepy town in Nepal known for being the birthplace of Buddha.

In Chinese director Kang Yuqi’s docu­mentary A Little Wisdom, which premiered in Shanghai last month after a long tour on the international festival circuit, Hopakuli and his fellow novices are always up to mischief in the quiet monastery they call home. They climb trees to eat crisps on the sly, play with miniature toy guns and fight among themselves in the prayer hall, cursing and swearing their way through the day.

Kang says her original perception of monastic life was “vastly different” from what she witnessed when she arrived in Lumbini as a film-school student trying to make a documentary about Buddhism. Accepting an invitation to live in a monastery inhabited mostly by young boy monks, she was taken aback to find the novices were hardly the carefree cherubs seen in tourist brochures.

Most of the boys end up in Lumbini by chance rather than spiritual calling, Kang says. Impoverished parents often send their children to monasteries for the food, shelter and schooling they cannot provide themselves.

“The young boys’ understanding of the outside world is influenced by TV, Facebook and other stimuli despite them being geographically isolated,” she says.

In A Little Wisdom, the boys are shown glued to their ­phones, watching cartoons and films, and they can be seen cele­brating the New Year by dancing to pop music surrounded by DIY strobe lighting.