Loving Karma: A moving exploration of troubled childhoods and compassion
Loving Karma by Johnny Burke and Andrew Hinton was screened at the Dharamshala International Film Festival 2025
How does one process a troubled childhood? For urban folk with a tidy sum of money, psychiatry offers a way. But this accessibility changes with demographics, governments, communities, and families, in no particular order.
Loving Karma by Johnny Burke and Andrew Hinton, which was screened at the Dharamshala International Film Festival 2025, is a journey that attempts to process the trauma of troubled childhoods, and explores what nurturing and compassion can do for children.
The film is a follow-up to the Emmy-winning documentary by the directors, Tashi and the Monk (2014). The latter portrays a “brave social experiment” by Lobsang Phuntsok, who left behind a life as a Buddhist monk to go to the US, only to return and create a community school – Jhamste Gatsal – for “unwanted children.” Phuntsok adopts these children, who are either abandoned by their families or born to poor or unstable parents.
Set in the remote mountains of Arunachal Pradesh, the central character of Loving Karma is Tashi Drolma, who was a wild child Phuntsok took under his wings during Tashi and the Monk. In Loving Karma, we are reintroduced to Tashi, still a wild child with a dash of anger. She is a bully who beats up her classmates and tortures her stuffed toys: “I’ll cut your throat,” she says to her doll, until an elder asks her to go to sleep, at which point she says, “I am talking to my baby.”
The film then takes a leap of 12 years, when Tashi has grown into a grounded teenager entrusted with new, similarly wild children joining the community.
Burke and Hinton are experienced filmmakers who deploy a certain naturalised intimacy in their work. The documentary fulfils its purpose by approaching its subjects with the basics in place: informed consent, narrativised filming, and truth-telling.
Loving Karma romanticises Phuntsok’s approach to life and bears witness to his guilt — of hating his own mother due to his illegitimate childhood, and the difficulty of having to turn away some children in need. One such child who was turned away by Jhamste Gatsal later dies by suicide, leading to an outpouring of self-reproach on Phuntsok’s part.
The narrative is compelling but can be repetitive at times, with different dramatic background scores keeping the story moving. This might even make the film seem fictional in parts, as if the lens has shed its objectivity. But we are at a time when the strict boundaries of fiction and nonfiction are getting blurrier. The partial shedding of objectivity is the need of the hour, and Burke and Hinton have recognised this. These unusual takes in Loving Karma have made the film extraordinarily moving, a kind of closure to Tashi and the Monk, as life comes full circle for Phuntsok.
