Reportage – 2004

Tibetan director explores radicalism among youth in Exile

DHARAMSHALA, India, 9 Jan 2004 (AFP)

For most the Tibetan exile cause is synonymous with the pacifist Dalai Lama, but one of the community's few film directors is exploring a nascent radicalism of young people disillusioned outside their Chinese-ruled homeland.

The pointedly titled "We're No Monks" profiles young people who sense they will spend their lives away from Tibet, most likely in Dharamsala, the quiet Indian hill station that is home to the Dalai Lama and thousands of other exiles.

One character's travails revolve around his estrangement from his wife. Another is jobless and thinks his future lies in immigrating to the United States.

But another young man, Pasang, has just fled from Tibet. He is angry and wants complacent Tibetan exiles to get radical in confronting China.

Pasang hatches up a plan to sabotage the convoy of a Chinese official visiting India or to kidnap Chinese diplomats based in New Delhi in hopes of avenging his anguish and securing the release of Tibetans jailed by Beijing.

The film is directed by Pema Dhondup, a Dharamsala-based Tibetan who learned his craft through a Fulbright scholarship that took him to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "I have tried to show where the Tibetan youth in exile may lead their freedom struggle to in the future," Dhondup said.

"The Tibetan youths are starting to feel deceived by the Chinese betrayal and they want to do something radical," he said. His tone is at odds with that of the Dalai Lama, revered by Tibetans as their spiritual leader, who fled Lhasa for India in 1959 amid a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

The Dalai Lama, 68, has won a worldwide network of supporters - and the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize - for his insistence on a "middle path." He condemns violence, favors dialogue and urges Tibetans to feel no hatred for China.

In November, the Buddhist leader told a news conference in Rome that the world should "make good friends with China."

But despite Beijing's hosting of two delegations from the Dalai Lama since 2002, activists charge that China, which has ruled Tibet since 1951, is erasing the Himalayan territory's identity through political repression and a flood of ethnic Han migration. The Tibetan movement has toyed with violence before. After the takeover by China, the CIA helped develop a small Tibetan guerrilla base in Mustang across the border in Nepal.

But the United States dropped support for Tibetan militants as it moved closer to Beijing and eventually recognized the People's Republic of China. The Dalai Lama in 1974 appealed for the guerrillas to give up. "We're No Monks" is one of the few films about Tibet made by Tibetans. In 1997, Martin Scorsese directed "Kundun," a sympathetic portrait of the Dalai Lama from his selection as a Buddha reincarnation until the young man's flight into exile.

Sonam Phuntsok, who acted in "Kundun," plays the carefree Tsering in "We're No Monks," but most of the actors in the Tibetan production are amateurs. "We have opted not to act like in feature films," Phuntsok said.

"I think this gives the film an added value," he said. "It carries an important message."

The movie opens in India in February and Tibetan campaigners plan also to screen it in New York. The film also features Bollywood star Gulshan Grover, who agreed to perform in the low-budget movie for free, as an Indian police officer who locks up the young Tibetan radical with the rationale, "I am only worried about the path they are taking."

The director said his goal with the film was to put forward a question, not necessarily to make a statement on a budding radicalism among Tibetans. "It is a film now. What if it really turns into reality?" Dhondup said.

"I don't think anybody wants such a mess. It is high time that world started paying attention to the issue before it gets to what Tibetans have not imagined doing."