As a Tibetan director dedicated to illuminating, with love and insight, the everyday culture of his contested homeland, navigating China’s labyrinthine and often-changing filmmaking approval processes cannot be an easy task. And yet, over the course of now seven films, despite or possibly because of those restrictions, Pema Tseden has amassed the most quietly inspiring of filmographies, his novelist’s eye yielding storytelling far richer than just ethnography or social observation. His beautiful, funny and tragic newest film, “Balloon,” which follows the trail of his last, “Jinpa,” in premiering in the Venice Horizons sidebar before traveling on to Toronto, is a case in point — both , but alive always to the co-existence of the banal with the spiritual.
Three generations of a Tibetan farming family, represented by a grandfather (Konchok), father Dargye (Jinpa) and Dargye’s two rambunctious young sons (Druklha Dorje and Palden Nyima), are out on a hillock...
Three generations of a Tibetan farming family, represented by a grandfather (Konchok), father Dargye (Jinpa) and Dargye’s two rambunctious young sons (Druklha Dorje and Palden Nyima), are out on a hillock...
- 9/4/2019
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Wangdrak (Druklha Dorje) is a spirited first-grader living in a rural farming village in Tibet. As the movie begins, his daily routine, walking to school with a neighborhood girl, playing with his wind-up frog, has been disrupted by the rainy season and his lack of proper footwear. The walk to school is treacherous with deep rain puddles, and poor Wangdrak has to be carried across by his friend. If that humiliation wasn't bad enough, he has to endure his classmates brazenly enjoying their rain boots and splashing about, carefree, all recess long. Unfortunately, his family doesn't have the means to buy him the galoshes he requires. His father is a farmer, the success of his crops at the mercy of the elements, while his mother...
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- 10/2/2018
- Screen Anarchy
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