By Etan Vlessing
TORONTO – Fearing reprisals by the Chinese government against the participants in a new documentary about Tibet, Canadian film officials will take extraordinary security measures when the movie makes its world premiere in Toronto Tuesday.
“Tibet: What Remains of Us” will be unveiled at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, timed to coincide with exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama’s Canadian tour.
Security guards will be positioned at the doors of the Bloor Cinema to ensure that Chinese officials do not smuggle in recording equipment or miniature cameras to capture audio or footage from the documentary to identify ordinary Tibetan participants for possible reprisals, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) said Friday. The state-funded agency will also install infrared heat sensors in the auditorium, and officials will wear thermal goggles to detect the heat signature of any video equipment.
“Other festivals have been doing this for questions of copyright,” said “Tibet” executive producer Andre Picard, director general of French programming at the NFB. “Our reasons are very different. People could take snapshots of individual scenes” from the Tibet documentary.
For that reason, any recording devices — digital or analog — will be barred from the cinema.
The documentary by Montreal-based filmmakers Francois Prevost and Hugo Latulippe portrays Canadian-born Kalsang Dolma smuggling a mini DVD screen into Tibet that contains a taped message of hope from the Dalai Lama to his people.
During the feature-length film, which took seven years to complete, Dolma shows local Tibetans the Dalai Lama’s message and invites them to respond with their own message for him.
Their participation is punishable by imprisonment as Tibet’s Chinese rulers have banned any photos or video representations of the Dalai Lama in that country in an effort to reduce his dominant position in Tibetan Buddhism.
Taking precautions during the filming of “Tibet,” Prevost and Latulippe disguised the locations of film shoots and deleted all mention of names belonging to participating Tibetans.
The NFB said it is protecting prints of the documentary to ensure that it does not end up in the hands of Chinese officials.
said technology typically used in cinemas to guard against copyright pirates illegally recording an entire movie will be used against potential Chinese government agents. After Hot Docs, the documentary will go on limited release in Montreal and Toronto.
“We’re trying to be as cautious and prudent as possible in the sequence and release of the film to minimize the risk to its participants,” Picard said.
The NFB has not yet considered a broadcast window for the documentary but said it could go forward by blurring the faces of Tibetans appearing in the film, NFB programrs said.
The filmmakers insisted they are acting out of concern for Tibetans appearing in the documentary and are not responding to diplomatic concerns by China as the Dalai Lama meets with Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and other top officials here.
The Dalai Lama’s Canadian tour has been highly publicized. He appeared in Vancouver at a public event hosted by actress Goldie Hawn and in Ottawa, where Alanis Morissette acted as master of ceremonies.
On Friday, Martin became the first Canadian prime minister to meet with the Dalai Lama. Martin went out of his way to insist he discussed “spiritual” issues with the Tibetan leader in a bid to dispel strong objections to the meeting from China.
On Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan told a Beijing news conference that, in the interests of “smooth Sino-Canadian relations,” Canada should not give the Dalai Lama a platform for his political activism.
