By Sandra McLean
AFTER 21 years, Tibetan Ama Adhe Tapontang, emerged from a Chinese prison with her life and a quilted piece of material.
The quilt is hardly a cosy memento. Instead, stitched from garments of scores of fellow Tibetan nuns who died during their imprisonment, it is a daily reminder of the sacrifices made in Tibet’s 55-year struggle for independence from China.
Speaking softly in Tibetan, Ama offers her quilt to the camera in Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion, telling how, of the 100 young women imprisoned with her, only four survived.
It is a particularly harrowing moment in this big-screen documentary, the latest addition to the trend toward non-fiction cinema, which gives audiences a rare glimpse at the real story behind the cultural, religious and human rights struggle still happening in 21st-century Tibet.
It’s a story which took American filmmaker and cameraman Tom Peosay 10 years and nine visits to Tibet to make.
He had been working as a news cameraman in 1987 when the border between Nepal and Tibet opened for the first time since the Chinese occupied Tibet in 1949 to execute what Mao Zedong’s communist government described as a “peaceful liberation”.
“What we found was so amazing – this place had been isolated for so long,” Peosay says. “There were all these monasteries we saw along the road to Lhasa (the Tibetan capital) which were all bombed out and looked like they were 500 years old, but they were only 30 years old. At the time we thought we knew a lot about the world, but we didn’t know about this.”
So Peosay and his wife, Sue, decided the story of Tibet should be told in detail.
To make cinema-goers understand the Tibet of today, the Peosays needed to go well beyond the Free Tibet pamphlets found at any pop concert. They had to go back several centuries when the country was ruled by warrior kings who became peace-loving Buddhists. They also had to carefully document China’s involvement in Tibet in the early half of the 20th century which has wrought irrevocable change.
Peosay also wanted to present the human face of the country, and interviewed Tibetan Buddhist nuns and monks, spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and many Tibetan refugees, some of whom were trained in guerilla warfare by the US Central Intelligence Agency, only to see their cause dumped when the Americans started courting China in the late 1970s.
Peosay also interviewed several westerners, including Robert Ford, one of the few westerners to live in pre-Chinese Tibet during the 1930s, and Robert Thurman (film actress Uma’s father), director of Tibet House in New York City.
Thurman is a particularly erudite speaker on Tibet and he gives information that succinctly presents what the Tibetans had and what they they have lost.
He tells how before the Chinese occupation Tibet was a Buddhist theocracy that invested 85 per cent of its national budget to support monastic universities where monks and nuns studied the mind.
That, notes Thurman, would be equivalent to the entire US defence budget going into education so as to produce “enlightened people”. The Cultural Revolution virtually ended this way of life in Tibet as it led to the destruction of 6000 monasteries and the torture and punishment of monks.
The film starts with footage taken in 1987 of one such monk, Jampa Tenzin, dramatically rescuing some of his peers from a burning police station. He was severely injured and hailed as a hero but, eventually, he was arrested by the Chinese, tortured and killed.
In an interview, Tenzin does not want revenge but says he feels compassion for his torturers.
Peosay says he encountered this attitude constantly among the Tibetans. “They hold no animosity towards the Chinese,” Peosay says. “They see them as being deluded – it’s like, ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do’. They look at the world as a glass that is half-full rather than half-empty.
“These lessons are very profound and you can see what happens to a whole culture where everyone believes in reincarnation. It changes everything because their saviour is always with them and watching over them. This requires a positive response.”
Peosay’s film doesn’t dwell in the past. It looks forward to the future of Tibet. He says there is the hopelessly negative scenario in which Tibetans will be second-class citizens in their own country, unable to get access to education and employment. Also, a new railway will bring more Chinese to Tibet.
But, says Peosay, it will also bring Chinese who are aware of what is happening in Tibet and want to support Tibetan culture.
Earlier this month the Dalai Lama said Tibet might even benefit more by remaining with China because it needed assistance in fields such as technology.
This modernisation must coincide with the protection of Tibetan culture and the environment of the Himalayan region. Also, he noted, that quite a few Chinese were “showing an interest in the preservation of Tibetan culture and spirituality”.
Perhaps, but Beijing is still detaining people for waving flags demanding freedom for Tibet, and a report by the International Campaign for Tibet released this month documents the rise in religious repression, including crackdowns on prayer ceremonies for the Dalai Lama, and a new move by the Chinese Government to take over the traditional identification of tulkus, or reincarnated Buddhist monks and nuns.
It continues to amaze Peosay that despite this, Tibetans continue their non-violent campaign. This difference in approach, he says, is a direct result of the monastic heritage in Tibet literally blown away by the Chinese.
