Another year in Würzburg, another International Film Weekend. As I did last year, I bought a 10-pack of tickets a couple weeks before the festival took place. Unfortunately, I was only able to find time to use 5 of the tickets to actually see films, but I was happy with my choices. Here’s a quick run-down of what I saw and what I thought about them. There are probably some spoilers.
I just got back from seeing the second movie of the Tibetan Film Festival at Filmhouse Cinema. This film, “Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion” was a straight-up documentary about the history of the Tibetan struggle, as opposed to the first one, “Kundun“, which was more of a docu-drama. Being a documentary, it provided much of the background to the situation and gave context to the first one. In this aspect, it may have been more useful to show them in reverse order.
The documentary had numerous very powerful scenes, most of which concerned the torture of the Tibetan people. Many times, the term genocide was mentioned. Either because of my own ignorance, or lack of media attention, I was not aware the attrocities were on this scale. The number of deaths that were quoted were somewhat confusing. At some point, 30 million was stated and compared to the relatively few murders committed by Hitler and other ethnic cleansers of recent past. A little while later, 1.5 million was stated as a number of deaths. I must have missed something. A point that was emphasized at the end of the film, by the Dalai Lama himself, was the importance of non-agressive resistance against the Chinese. To have X million of your followers killed and maintain this policy is asounding and one of the main things that draw me toward the religion/philosphy/idea of Buddhism. More on this later.
A quick summary of the first film of the festival “Kundun” is that is follows the current Dalai Lama’s life from being discovered in a small village to making the choice to leave his country in order to better serve it. Of the ciriticisms I’ve read of this film, the most prominent one is that because the Dalai Lama consulted, it is somewhat one-sided in its retelling of the facts. This may be true, but in light of the horrible images displayed by the second film, is somewhat inconsequential. It might even be said that it isn’t as one-sided as it could have been considering its lack of such images.
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