The Silent Holy Stones

I found this film stunning! First saw it at a festival and have been waiting forever to get my own copy to show friends who think there are no Tibetans left in Tibet. Not only are there millions of people, but among them has emerged a sensitive artistic "voice" that draws us into the feelings of Tibetan people with compassion and humor and without overly sentimental or exaggerated exoticism. Took my breath away. Have also discovered that the director - Pema Tseden from Amdo (Qinghai) - is an author, writing in Tibetan and Chinese and that translations of his works are beginning to appear in several countries (not yet in the U.S). As I read Chinese I've been able to read a few short stories of his that I found (with some difficulty) on Chinese language Internet sites. The stories were as fresh and original as his films. (See also his film, Old Dog, a recent award winner. Very different tone than this one. And there is another that will hopefully be available from Amazon eventually, The Search.) Can't wait for more from him! Can't wait to see where he will go artistically. [If you read French, Amazon Canada can supply you a recent French translation of one of his short story collections. This is Neige (Littérature grand format) (French Edition) "Niege" means "snow", the title of one of the stories in the collection. [Film info: Director/Screenwriter: Pema Tseden Art Director: Actors: Young Lama (main character) Danpei Lama; Tulku Gyapontsang as the Little Living Buddha Cast primarily non-professional local people.]Director currently working on yet another film rich with Tibetan traditions and story.

The story is very thin, plot wise, but the views of the monastery are great.

Nice movie

'Silent Holy Stones', a film by Pema Tseden 'Silent Holy Stones', the debut feature by Tibetan director, Pema Tseden, was shot on location in the Tibetan region of Amdo (in what is today part of China's Qinghai Province) in 2004. It was the first ever Tibetan language movie to have been filmed in Tibet and the first to feature an entirely Tibetan cast. Shot in and around Guwa Monastery, in the area where the director was born and raised, 'Silent Holy Stones' narrates the tale of a young monk's obsession with watching a popular television series - an adaptation of the Chinese Buddhist classic, 'Journey to the West' - and his efforts to bring a television back to the monastery to allow his teacher to watch it with him. Television: we've all grown up with it, no doubt we all take it for granted, ubiquitous object in all our living rooms. Yet there are still parts of the world where possession of a telly is something to aspire to, a status symbol that represents all that is modern and most desirable. Indeed, in Pema Tseden's film the television set is admired, fingered, stroked, almost as if it were a fetish object in itself. In its own way it plays a more central role in the movie than any of the human characters. Not only the TV set, but other every-day modern items such as motorbikes, music systems, even children's sweets and a toy monkey mask take on distinctive roles. Familiar yet at the same time not so, they stand out in curiously sharp relief, as if their very foreignness were somehow accentuated by the purely Tibetan backdrop of the film. In fact, it is this stark contrast that forces us into an awareness of both the strength and durability of native Tibetan culture and traditions and the ways in which these traditions are being subtly undermined by modernisation. These changes may partly reflect China's colonial presence and policies in Tibet; they are also the more universal consequence of challenges which face traditional societies all over the world. Indeed what makes Pema Tseden unique as a chronicler of contemporary Tibet is the non-judgemental manner in which he juxtaposes the traditional and the novel. After all, the notion that they are losing their culture almost certainly never occurs to Tibetans when they load a VCD into their player or turn on the telly. The effects of this may be comical (even farcial) as when a performance of the traditional Tibetan opera, 'Drime Kunden', staged to celebrate new year, finishes only to be immediately replaced by a makeshift disco where the performers dance raucously to the loud thump of Tibetan techno. However, both the opera and the disco are presented as simple facts of contemporary Tibetan life. There is no suggestion we assign a greater value to one than the other. At other moments the tone of the film is more elegiac, the fragility and vulnerability of manners and customs that have endured for generations feels almost palpable. The death at the end of the film of an old man who lives alone in the mountains chiselling Buddhist mantras into stone as an act of piety could almost serve as metaphor for the passing into history of a now obsolete way of life. 'Silent Holy Stones', like the director's two subsequent films, 'The Search' and 'Old Dog', portrays Tibet as a contemporary, evolving (at times rapidly evolving) culture. This places his work in deliberate contrast to much Western (and indeed Tibetan) writing and film making on Tibet which suffers from a tendency to romanticize the country and its people, transforming it into a fairytale land of monks and nuns realizing profound truths in picture-postcard monasteries high in the mountains -- think Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet. Such myth making comes at a cost, however, for it denies Tibetans the fundamental right to be normal - after all, to mythologize is ultimately to dehumanize. Indeed Pema Tseden's Tibet is not a land of soaring peaks and picturesque monasteries. It is a land of stark brown hills and squat featureless one-storey houses. But, it is just this authenticity of setting which allows us a window through which to observe the challenges faced by a deeply traditional society as it grapples with the consequences of radical and irreversible change.