2011

The films of the Tibetan film archive evening courtesy of Tibet Film Archive, New York.

Rare and unusual footage of dance, prayer, and chanting filmed by German documentarians filmed in the North East of Tibet in the 1920’s. Includes Cham dances at the Kumbum monastery as well as pilgrims earning money for their journey to a Tibetan Lama monastery.

Tibeter Tänze buddhistischer Pilger (Zentralasien, Osttibet), 1957, author R. Nebesky-Wojkowitz

The films of the Tibetan film archive evening courtesy of Tibet Film Archive, New York.

Film about the early exile years of Tibetan Exiles in India.

Using undercover footage and stills, Meltdown in Tibet blows the lid off China’s huge and potentially catastrophic dam-building projects in Tibet. The mighty rivers sourced in Tibet are lifelines to the people of India and Southeast Asia. These rivers are at great risk from rapidly receding glaciers—a meltdown accelerated by climate change—and from large-scale damming and diversion, due to massive Chinese engineering projects.

A Shawl to Die For tracks the ancient craft of shahtoosh weaving in Kashmir, India and discovers its links to the Tibetan antelope or Chiru found on the Chang Tang plateau in the Tibet Autonomous region of China. The documentary discovers and establishes that shahtoosh is in fact, the under-fleece of the Chiru, which is killed to extract this extraordinary fibre. This wool however comes with a historical importance as it has been woven into fabric only in the Kashmir valley in north India.

The films of the Tibetan film archive evening courtesy of Tibet Film Archive, New York.

The films of the Tibetan film archive evening courtesy of Tibet Film Archive, New York.

The films of the Tibetan film archive evening courtesy of Tibet Film Archive, New York.

A Stranger in my Native Land is the poignant and personal account of Tenzing Sonam’s first-ever visit to his homeland. From the far reaches of Amdo Province, where Tibetans have lost their language, to Lhasa, the heart of the country, the film captures his meetings with long-lost relatives and conveys a sense of the desperation of Tibet as a country under occupation.

Telo Rinpoche, a.k.a. Eddie Ombadykow, is a 21-year-old American whose favourite band is The Smashing Pumpkins. He is also a Buddhist monk who was brought up in a Tibetan monastery in India and recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as a high reincarnate lama. Now, he finds himself in his ancestral homeland, Kalmykia, a remote Buddhist republic in southern Russia, where he is revered by the people as their spiritual leader and charged with the responsibility of reviving Buddhism.