The journey to freedom

Saibal Chatterjee

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It cannot be easy making Tibetan films. An ecosystem to support cinema in exile is non-existent. But, then, Dharamsala-based documentary filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, who founded their production company White Crane Films in the early 1990s, have never opted for paved paths. They have revelled in chipping away and breaking new ground, one film at a time about the political situation in Tibet and its terrible repercussions on a people and their culture.

Their second narrative feature, Kyoyang Ngarmo (The Sweet Requiem), has surmounted many an obstacle on its arduous way to fruition. Now that it has made it to the 43rd Toronto International Film Festival’s Contemporary World Cinema selection, it is set for another new journey that will shine a light on the plight of Tibetans, both in Tibet and in refugee settlements. The last time that Sarin and Tenzing went to TIFF was nearly a decade and a half ago with their first narrative feature, Dreaming Lhasa, the story of a New York filmmaker, who lands in Dharamsala to rediscover her Tibetan roots. She sets off with a former monk, recently arrived in India, in search of a resistance fighter whose whereabouts are unknown.

Like most of their other cinematic essays, The Sweet Requiem is set in the heart of the Tibetan community and addresses the themes of deracination, cultural identity and reconciliation. “It is not a follow-up to Dreaming Lhasa in the strictest sense of the term, but it definitely is an extension of the same concerns and issues. It is about the struggle to come to terms with the past and the choices one makes in life,” says Sarin.

A micro-budget film with the ‘ambitions’ of a big cinematic project, The Sweet Requiem was filmed in Ladakh at an altitude of 15,000 feet. Sarin reveals that they — the two directors and the film’s New York-based co-producer Shrihari Sathe — have a launched a Kickstarter campaign seeking the funds that they need for not only promoting the film in Toronto but also taking it beyond the festival.

“TIFF is a great festival. It’ll be exciting to be among such a large number of films and before such large audiences,” says Sarin, who hopes that the three press shows (one of which happened two weeks in advance of the festival) and three public screenings will get The Sweet Requiem the visibility that it requires in order to kick on from here and reach wider audiences.

The long gap that separates Sarin and Tenzing’s first and second appearances in TIFF is in sharp contrast to Assamese director Rima Das’ back-to-back Festival entries. Das was in TIFF last year with her breakout effort Village Rockstars. This year, her third directorial venture, Bulbul Can Sing, filmed pretty much with the ‘cottage industry’ approach of her previous effort, has made the Contemporary World Cinema cut.

As she did in the case of the National Award-winning Village Rockstars, Das filmed Bulbul Can Sing in her own village over a period od two months. It is another coming-of-age tale seen through the eyes of a young girl but as the official TIFF website suggests, it probably has a harder edge. Village Rockstars was several years in the making, but Bulbul has taken far less time to take wings, an indication of the filmmaker's growing confidence.

What binds The Sweet Requiem and Bulbul Can Sing, two films that have emerged from different spaces, cultures and impulses, is their fierce spirit of independence. Both have sprung from a system far removed from India’s established production and exhibition structures and bank almost entirely on non-professional actors drawn from the places that the films are located in.

Bulbul Can Sing has only one pro in the cast. So does The Sweet Requiem, in which first-time actress Tenzin Dolker, dancer, yoga instructor and photographer born in a south Indian refugee settlement, plays 26-year-old Delhi resident Dolker, a girl who escaped from Tibet with her father at the age of eight, a hazardous journey that ended in tragedy.

Eighteen years later, in Majnu ka Tilla, she spots Gompa (Jampa Kalsang, one of the most experienced Tibetan actors in exile; he had a key role in Dreaming Lhasa), the guide who deserted them during the ill-fated trip across the Tibet-Nepal border. The encounter reignites suppressed memories of the past and triggers a quest for closure. The narrative, reveals Sarin, has two strands — one pertaining to the past, the other set in the present — that reveal the stories of Dolker and Gompa from different perspectives.

The Sweet Requiem, like Dreaming Lhasa, is a female-centric film, but its gaze does not exclude men. “It is a film written by a man and co-directed by a woman,” Sarin quips.

Described as “an intimate and personal story that is part psycho-political thriller and part escape drama”, The Sweet Requiem is inspired by a September 2006 incident on the Nangpa-La pass where Chinese border guards opened fire on a group of Tibetans attempting to escape to India and killed a 17-year-old nun and injured many others.

The Sweet Requiem seeks to underscore the increasing urgency of the Tibetan struggle, which remains largely away from the media glare and from the view of the global community. The world premiere at TIFF is, therefore, full of possibilities, both for the film and the political questions that it raises.