Tibet Festival Focuses on People’s Plight

The Tibet Film Festival, composed of seven films screening over eight days at the Nuart starting Wednesday, is a rich, consciousness-raising experience that focuses attention on the terrible plight of the Tibetan people, who are shown facing nothing less than genocide after 40 years of oppressive Chinese rule.

Three of the films complement each other beautifully to create a rounded portrait of a people who, in the words of a young woman who has never seen her ancestral homeland, put “spiritual development before material progress.”

Marie Jaoul de Poncheville and Franz-Christophe Giercke’s “Lung Ta: The Forgotten Tibet” (Wednesday through Saturday) is an instance of words deliberately at odds with images. Narrator Richard Gere says that what we’re seeing was heavily censored in Beijing to the extent that not once do we even glimpse the Chinese military presence that has resulted in more than 1 million deaths over the past 40 years; no wonder the filmmakers have added a prologue of footage smuggled out of Tibet showing Chinese soldiers savagely beating monks and nuns engaged in a peaceful demonstration for independence. It’s a vision of Shangri-La turned into hell on Earth. As a longtime friend and supporter of the exiled Dalai Lama, Gere brings a calm but clear passion to the eloquent text written by the filmmakers in collaboration with Pierre Joffroy and Andrew Harvey.

We’re told that the traditional festival of dances with their exquisite costumes and music is one of the few times in the year that the Tibetans can shed their Mao suits and celebrate their own culture. Terrible statistics and grim information undercut pastoral vistas: nuclear wastes deposited in Tibetan rivers, posing dire implications for the water supply throughout all of Southeast Asia; devastation of forests and wildlife; the wholesale destruction of thousands of temples and monasteries with their collections of art and literature. It would seem that what remains of Tibet’s ancient culture has been preserved purely for the sake of tourism.

Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin’s poignant 62-minute “The Reincarnation of Khensur Rinpoche” (Sunday and next Monday) takes us into the heart of Tibetan religion, which is being carefully preserved in the Drepung Monastery, once the largest in Tibet and now relocated in Southern India. Concerned that there has been no sign of the reincarnation of their leader some four years after his death, the monks are elated to receive a letter smuggled out of Tibet from a woman saying that her 4-year-old son, a child of gentle disposition, has experienced a vision of the Nechung Oracle, a key guardian spirit in the Tibetan faith. How will the monks get the boy out of Tibet? Will he meet the tests for authenticity, if and when he arrives? Not only does this engaging documentary illuminate the tenets of Tibetan belief but it also generates a considerable degree of suspense.

Playing with “Khensur Rinpoche” is Anne Henderson’s 57-minute “A Song for Tibet,” which provides a valuable perspective both on the other two films and Tibet’s predicament in relation to the rest of the world. The key figures are Dicki Chhoyang, a 25-year-old woman born in India of Tibetan parents and raised in Montreal, and Tubthen (Sam) Samdup, the 42-year-old head of the Canada-Tibet Committee, who has not seen his homeland since he was 9 years old. Dicki and Sam, attractive and articulate, mince no words in making clear that Tibet and its people have suffered so long and so severely because of the superpowers’ unwillingness to offend China.

Their point is driven home vividly when the Dalai Lama, a recent Nobel laureate, visits Canada and is not received by the prime minister. Shunted off to a side room at Canada’s capital in Ottawa, the serene Dalai Lamai delivers his message of peace not only for Tibet but for all the world, undaunted by the constant tinkling of bells summoning lawmakers for a vote.

Screening on April 21 is Richard Kohn’s 108-minute “Lord of the Dance/Destroyer of Illusion” (1985), which takes us to two Buddhist monasteries in Nepal, focusing on Tibetan religious rituals and their leader Trulghig Rinpoche. Screening April 22 are three shorts, two of them devoted to the ancient Bon religion--”Menri Monastery” and “A Tibetan New Year”--and “Land of the Snowy Mountains,” a brief account of the search for the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman. Information: (213) 478-6379.