Charmingly mild and endearing

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom Cast: Sherab Dorji Director: Pawo Choyning Dorji Duration: 1 h 49 m Available: At the Bell Lightbox in Toronto.

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom — an Oscar nominee this year for best international film, and the first time Bhutan has been so honoured — is perfectly paced, and notable as much for what it doesn’t do as for what it does so well.

The story follows Ugyen (Sherab Dorji), a teacher in the small town of Gedu. Unhappy in his work and anxious to move somewhere more bustling — the whole country has fewer than a million people — Ugyen is dismayed to learn he’s been assigned to the one-room schoolhouse in Lunana.

The remote mountain village has no cell reception and a yak-based economy. Ugyen is politely aghast. But Lunana also features wondrous mountain scenery, cute-as-buttons children and residents so friendly that the villagers make a two-hour trek to meet him near the end of his several-days hike to their home.

Ugyen slowly becomes smitten with the villagers and their lifestyle. But I mentioned there are things the film doesn’t do, and here are a few. It doesn’t exaggerate the city-boy-in-the-country journey. It doesn’t make too much of a shy, gentle love that seems to blossom with a local woman.

It doesn’t even overplay the yak in the classroom.

For the most part it just hangs out yakkily at the back of the room.

Writer/director Pawo Choyning Dorji focuses most of his attention on the bonds that form between the teacher and the villagers. Ugyen has to modify his pedagogy for English vocabulary when he realizes that, while the children know “apple,” they’ve never seen a “car.”

There’s also a lovely exchange between the teacher and the village headman. Finding himself unexpectedly fitting in, Ugyen jokes that perhaps he was a yak herder in a previous life. The headman says no, Ugyen was probably something even more auspicious. He was probably a yak himself. ★★★★