'Tibet' 101 is still better than no Tibet at all

'Tibet' 101 is still better than no Tibet at all

By Erik Lundegaard
Special to The Seattle Times
21 November 2003 Seattle Times

Tibetan monks parade past Chinese soldiers at a festival in central Tibet.

It would be hard to come up with a greater test case for the world's apathy
than Tibet.

An isolated region, which for more than 1,000 years dedicated itself to
spiritual enlightenment, is invaded by its neighbor, the communist Chinese
(once called "Godless" in this country), who slowly remake it in their
image. They ban religion. They force the country's spiritual and political
leader, the Dalai Lama, to flee for his life. They massacre monks and nuns.
They import tens of thousands of their own people to replace those they
massacre. As the decades pass, the Tibetan people and their culture are
slowly buried. And how does the world respond?

It yawns. Sometimes it gives rock concerts. The best devote a portion of
their lives to lobbying for Tibet's freedom. For years this meant freedom
from Chinese rule, but increasingly it means freedom from genocide.

In this light, it may be unseemly to say anything negative about first-time
director Tom Peosay's new documentary, "Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion," but
it's never a critic's job to be seemly.

"Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion," narrated by Martin Sheen. Directed by Tom
Peosay. Written by Sue Peosay and Victoria Mudd. 104 minutes. Not rated;
suitable for mature audiences (contains stories and scenes of brutal
political repression). Harvard Exit.

 "Snow Lion" is basically Tibet 101, with a focus on the past 50 years of
Chinese repression. Interviews with various monks and nuns juxtapose an
idyllic, pre-repression childhood with decades of torture suffered in
Chinese prison and labor camps. Footage of colorful rural festivals and
horse-riding escapades are juxtaposed with the famine, squalor and
prostitution in present-day Lhasa, Tibet's capital.

As a gesture to impartiality, we get a Chinese government spokesman trotting
out the government line that Tibet has been a part of China since the 13th
century, but this point is allowed to disappear without refutation or
clarification. Much of the documentary is this way. It focuses too much on
what we know and not enough on what we don't.  There's also a muddy,
emotional liberalism here that (although liberal) I found annoying. The
filmmakers, for example, view a head-banging, Foo Fighters mosh pit at a
Tibetan Freedom concert in San Francisco as somehow positive, when, for me -
particularly after the testimonials of torture and repression - it
exemplified our culture's idiotic, head-banging spiritual bankruptcy.

The documentary improves as it brings us up to date. Mao died in 1976, and
the Cultural Revolution died with him. Capitalism arrived soon after. Isn't
this all good?

It's not. The Machiavellian nature of a totalitarian regime is mixing with
the callousness of capitalistic economic forces to help bury Tibet's
culture. The most disheartening story is the last.

In 1995, a 6-year-old Tibetan boy was hand-picked by the Dalai Lama to be
the 10th Panchen Lama - the second-ranked spiritual leader of Tibet, and the
reincarnation of the ninth Panchen Lama, who died in 1989. Soon afterward,
the boy was kidnapped by the Chinese government, who saw his appointment as
an usurpation of their authority. They've since chosen, and are educating,
their own Panchen Lama, who will one day pick the reincarnated (15th) Dalai
Lama after the current Dalai Lama dies.

The thought of such a spiritual undertaking in the hands of bureaucrats for
whom "religion is poison" (as Mao once said) creates a kind of slow horror
that almost redeems the rest of the film.