Dreaming Lhasa (2007)
Karma, a Tibetan filmmaker from New York, goes to Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama's exile headquarters in northern India, to make a documentary about former political prisoners who have escaped from Tibet. She wants to reconnect with her roots but is also escaping a deteriorating relationship back home.One of Karma's interviewees is Dhondup, an enigmatic ex-monk who has just escaped from Tibet. He confides in her that his real reason for coming to India is to fulfill his dying mother's last wish, to deliver a charm box to a long-missing resistance fighter. Karma finds herself unwittingly falling in love with Dhondup even as she is sucked into the passion of his quest, which becomes a journey into Tibet's fractured past and a voyage of self-discovery
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Absolutely the worst movie.
A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.
It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.
a movie like a song. about mixture of present and past. about exile and images from motherland. about roots and duties. about love, search of sense, people and their chain of shadows, about truth and its price. a story about Tibet but in special manner. not exactly a manifesto or new pledge against Chinese occupation. only definition of pain out freedom. the message is universal. and the delicate science to present a trip, gestures, words, meetings of two people - a woman from USA, a man from Tibet, each in space of Dharamsala, each piece of a way, each master of many questions , profound desires, and fundamental revelation. the virtue of film - courage of good measure. gentle form of tale. and art to be far from any exaggeration. a film like a song. Tibetan song. with so many nuances!
It's hard to believe a film about political dissent and torture could be boring, but somehow this is.The storyline is barely an excuse for a film, the dialogue is unbelievable, and the acting is atrocious. If this had been a documentary, it might have been decent. Since it can be revealed without spoilers that this is about a woman making a documentary, I can say that the scenes where she's viewing her interviews are gripping and are the best thing about this film.Example of dialogue: "So many have given their lives for Tibet, for us." "What the ... do I care about that?" And she loves this guy and she's doing a documentary on Tibet. OK, yeah.Spoiler here: The story involves a conspiracy about the CIA agitating the Tibetan resisters. Now, I don't know if this is true or not, but it sure distances the viewer from the torture and dissent to think it was all a CIA plot, doesn't it? It also makes the story totally uninteresting. If this guy they're looking for is just a CIA mole, who cares? Another problem is technical: The sound is awful, fuzzy and muffled. I could barely understand the English being spoken in a Tibetan accent, and there were no English subtitles for the deaf on the DVD. This led to the paradoxical situation where I could understand what was happening better when they were speaking Tibetan, because then there were English subtitles.I'll give it a 2 for the documentary-type scenes, the Tibetan chanting, and the scenery.
Under the guise of a simple plot -- Tibetan woman living in the West comes to Dharamsala, India and becomes involved in the search for a missing Tibetan man -- the film forces us to return to the sad story of Tibet.Starting with the invasion by China in 1949 and stretching to the political crackdown of 1987-88, we are reacquainted with the problem of Tibetan refugees, the Dalai Lama being the best recognized of them. We see a little of the life of those refugees in India. We get to meet four past political prisoners and the treatment and torture they suffered in the hands of the Chinese occupiers.This is not a documentary, but at the political level it works as one.
and the circumstances are: all actors are non-professional; the related topic and political message; and thus the financing; thus the persistence it was required in waiting for this film to get made; and the great possibility that it will not find a general audience.yet the trend in many of the recent risky films (from what I have been seeing) is that the narrative is merging the fictional with non-fictional. This film also intertwine interviews, a basically true story, locals, with a derivative plot. And the ending somewhat caught me by surprise. Not that the plot is complex. But the film pull in so far with it's rhythms that is (pardon the expression) oozing tranquility and the easy nature that seems to be Tibetan.*** possible spoilers***** in the time I saw this film was in the Toronto film fest, where previously I saw 2 other similar films : Broklyn Lobsters and Sunflower. However, those in comparison are heavy handed, straight forward and although realistic, lacks some kind of sincerity. These 2 films although personal, to me, chronicles and places the feeling instead of pauses and meander on an emotion, an uncertain feeling for that matter, needs an uncertain moment.