Articles
Grim tales describing hard times in Tibet
By Neal Genzlinger
NEW YORK, USA, 12 Month 2008 (NY Times)— "Tibet: Beyond Fear," on Saturday on the satellite channel Link TV, is advocacy filmmaking at its most brazen: it ends with a direct appeal from the Dalai Lama for the free-Tibet cause. But it has an emotional pull rather than a manipulative feel, thanks to the two personal stories at its center and the people who tell them.
They are a Tibetan Buddhist nun named Ngawang Sangdrol and a monk named Bagdro, and their straightforward accounts of what happened to them when they began to speak out against the Chinese government are told with a calm understatement that makes them riveting.
Both are far too young to have experienced the Chinese invasion of 1950; they tell of how they became aware of Tibet’s modern history only gradually because the older generation was too afraid of reprisal to talk about it. Eventually, though, they learned the facts and began protesting. Ngawang Sangdrol was imprisoned as a teenager in 1992; Bagdro, somewhat older, was jailed in 1988.
Both were eventually released and told their stories in the West; their broken English in this film is, somehow, part of what makes them so compelling. Ngawang Sangdrol, for instance, who would not stop protesting even while in prison and ultimately ended up with a 23-year sentence, describes this way her sister’s reaction when she was unexpectedly released in 2002:
"They told my sister pick up me. Then they says my sister cry. My sister thought it was just body. I'm died, she thought."