There Was a Film in Theaters You Never Noticed — About a Tibetan Man Searching for His Own Identity

Pema Tseden is called a director of the "Tibetan New Wave." He doesn't make his living off screen time in theaters.

Tharlo is Pema Tseden's fifth Tibetan-language film.

Pema Tseden is a Tibetan writer, screenwriter and director. In China's film world he is known for a run of art-house Tibetan-language films: his debut feature The Silent Holy Stones (2005), The Search (2007), Old Dog (2010) and The Sacred Arrow (2014).

These films show the daily life of Tibetans and the changes in their material and spiritual worlds. They made the rounds of festivals at home and abroad, collected a good deal of praise, and won Pema Tseden his reputation as a "Tibetan New Wave" director.

But like many art-house films, none of the four ever had a formal theatrical release.

With the fifth, Tharlo, his luck improved. Finished in 2015, the film first won something bigger: a place in the Orizzonti section of the Venice International Film Festival, then Best Adapted Screenplay at Taiwan's Golden Horse Film Festival, and after that selection by more than ten festivals in China and abroad. It was financed by the independent art-house outfit Tianhua Huatian, and in late 2016 the distributor Taihe Entertainment came on board and got it into cinemas. From late November it screened in batches in cities with denser Tibetan populations — Xining, Lanzhou, Lhasa — and on December 9 it opened in theaters in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere.

You probably never noticed that Tharlo was playing at all. Up against commercial films like Your Name. and Hacksaw Ridge, this "limited release" got about 0.2% of screening slots and grossed 935,000 yuan.

A publicist at Taihe Entertainment told QDaily they won't lose money on it. Over the past two years, as video streaming sites have moved into the mainstream, more and more "niche films" have found a way to make money online. The online rights to Tharlo have already been sold to iQiyi, and it will go up before long; that sale alone covers the film's costs.

Tharlo is adapted from a 7,000-word Tibetan-language short story Pema Tseden wrote in 2013. "Tharlo," the hero's name, means "the one who escaped." The through line is plain: a simple man walks out into the wider world and feels lost and anxious. Tharlo is a shepherd past middle age who has spent his life minding sheep in barren mountains. One day around 2005 he comes down to town to apply for a second-generation ID card and meets a short-haired young Tibetan woman at a barbershop. She flirts with him. When he goes back up the mountain, his mind has been shaken, and his solitude and quiet are broken for good.

Pema Tseden says the whole film turns on "searching for one's own identity." Tharlo keeps to a traditional Tibetan male custom and wears a small braid. "That braid becomes a symbol for him, an identity of his own. Then he goes looking for his identity — or you could say for official confirmation of that identity. Along the way, someone cuts the braid off. It's a symbol, and it forms a correspondence."

Tharlo is the film's absolute center; everyone else stands on the other side of a collision with him. When Pema Tseden first sat down to write the story, what came to him was simply "the image of a man with a small braid." He built the whole thread out from that image.

Tharlo is shot entirely in black and white. Pema Tseden says this was to render Tharlo's inner world: "He handles everything in only one way — black or white. He's the same himself: either he'll be a good man, or he'll turn into a bad one. So for a character like that, black-and-white images were the best choice."

Tharlo sees in black and white not only because of life on the mountain but because he carries the mark of an era. Pema Tseden says Tharlo is in his 40s and lived through the Cultural Revolution. "That stretch of history left a very particular mark on him, and it became his worldview. Everything he believes, all his values, rest on it."

Many details come from Pema Tseden's own memory. The 48-year-old director caught the tail end of the Cultural Revolution and remembers the "collective unconscious" of the struggle sessions. Monks in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries were forced to renounce their vows and to recite Quotations from Chairman Mao the way they chanted sutras — in the film, Tharlo recites Mao's "Serve the People" in that same singsong.

The film was shot in Pema Tseden's hometown: Guide County, in the Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai. Qinghai has five Tibetan autonomous prefectures — Hainan, Haibei, Huangnan, Yushu and Golog — plus the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. The "Hai," or sea, refers to Qinghai Lake.

Historically, the Tibetan tribes on what is now Qinghai territory grew out of the Tubo empire's absorption of the various peoples of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Tibetans make up a quarter of Qinghai's population today.

The mountain where Tharlo herds his sheep is the mountain Pema Tseden knew as a boy. The modern little town Tharlo walks down into is a hundred-odd kilometers from Guide County. When Pema Tseden was small, his parents made their living herding, and also came down the mountain to farm, planting along the banks of the Yellow River.

The main reason he got out of the mountains is that he was good at school; his life bears out the line about knowledge changing your fate. He was raised by his grandfather. Tibetan Buddhism holds a belief in reincarnation, and his grandfather took the boy to be the reincarnation of a scholarly uncle. He kept him in school year after year, hoping he would become a "state cadre" — a civil servant with an iron rice bowl.

Pema Tseden knocked around for years: a teacher-training secondary school, then four years teaching primary school, then the undergraduate Tibetan-language program at Northwest Minzu University in Lanzhou, Gansu. After graduating he was assigned a spell as a civil servant, went back for a master's in Tibetan-Chinese translation, and in 2002 was admitted to the MFA program at the Beijing Film Academy. He has stayed in Beijing ever since.

That makes 14 years in Beijing. Yet none of his five films shows the capital. He films only his hometown, with Tibetan actors speaking Tibetan and Chinese subtitles.

When he writes fiction he writes each story twice, once in each language, and publishes them in magazines for different readers. It isn't plain translation: "I'm writing with a different way of thinking. Tibetan has its own way of saying things."

Pema Tseden hears from Tibetan and non-Tibetan audiences alike. He says the response that stayed with him during the promotion of Tharlo came from a Tibetan viewer in Lhasa, who told him: "I may not have understood what your film was really about, but I support it — I'll bring a few friends to support it too." "I found that moving. Pure, simple support."

He hopes his work can reflect traditional Tibetan culture: "The religion and the various traditional cultures of Tibetan areas are unique — vast, and open to everything." He wants his own people to recognize themselves in his films: "Some films can't get even the most basic details right, and Tibetans find them completely false."

With audiences who don't speak Tibetan his feelings are more complicated; he doesn't want the work to lecture anyone. "I don't expect this film to make more people understand Tibetan culture, or to make more people want to understand it. Audiences differ — everyone's knowledge and experience differ. So I won't go out of my way to stress what I want to express. I hope viewers arrive at their own reading, and if they can see something of their own situation in Tharlo, better still."

Pema Tseden wears glasses, keeps his hair short and has a faint accent. If you passed him on the street you probably wouldn't take him for a Tibetan. But he says that when he first arrived in Gansu for university, he also had to adjust to a different way of living. "There were actually plenty of Tibetans around me, and plenty of people from different places, so of course there was a process of getting to know each other and fitting in. I adapted soon enough."

Then he came to Beijing and went through another adjustment, this one professional: student shorts first, then features, then a way into the film industry. Whatever a director's background, in a market-driven film business he is treated according to his work. Pema Tseden says the rules here are more direct: "How far you fit in depends on your so-called ability, too — otherwise you can't get into the circle. You can only rely on your own particular strength. You're not from a film family with people pushing you along, helping you; the only way in is through your own work."

Like other young directors with something to prove, Pema Tseden shot his debut, The Silent Holy Stones, on 3 million yuan scraped together from himself and his friends — "spending everything he had," as he put it.

Once The Silent Holy Stones made a name for itself, it was sold to CCTV's movie channel, distributed overseas and given some government funding, which together roughly covered the cost. The films after it went the same way.

Pema Tseden lives in Beijing now with his wife and son. His income in this city, he says, is "fine, about right." But he also says low-budget art films are not what he lives on. He takes film and video jobs from companies and government bodies, shooting shorts and documentaries that pay.

He says he has nothing against commercial films, because "film in the end always has a commercial side," and even art films need commercial backing. It's just that over the past two years, when film companies have come to him with commercial subjects, he has turned them down because he didn't like the material.

The companies he works with are mostly small art-house shops. He wouldn't say he has "made it into the film industry": "I'm not close to many people in it."

Pema Tseden is an inward man. "I had plenty of friends as a kid, but I never liked talking." As a teenager, he says, he spent a lot of time on his own. "I had a stretch like Tharlo's too, up the mountain herding sheep — a whole day without seeing a single person, just a radio and a book. I think experiences like that cultivate a sense of solitude in a person."

In the years since he became known, though, Pema Tseden has come to be treated as a symbolic figure of Tibetan culture. He has his own company, Himalaya, and Tibetan filmmakers around him. Tharlo's lead, Shide Nyima, graduated from the directing department of the Xi'an Film Academy and works as a poet, director and translator. The female lead, Yangshik Tso, born in 1991, started out as a singer in 2010 on the Qinghai TV talent show Hua Er Duo Duo (《花儿朵朵》).

There are other directors in the circle. Sonthar Gyal shot and art-directed The Silent Holy Stones and The Search, and in 2011 made his own first film as director, The Sun Beaten Path, about a young Tibetan man's self-redemption and repentance after he accidentally kills his mother.

Pema Tseden's life today mixes "tradition and modernity." He goes home from time to time, and over the past two years has seen more collision and more change. "These two years I've felt it more strongly — the changes seem bigger. So you can see that process of change in my films. Ways of living, ways of thinking have changed. Some traditional things have disappeared, and some new things have come in."

In Tharlo, change is tinted with pessimism and loneliness. Tharlo, who sees only black and white, finally chooses to be a bad man: he sells off every sheep his employer owns and stakes it all on love, only to be betrayed by the young woman. The last shot shows him alone in open country, leaning on his stalled motorcycle, lighting a firecracker.

"For a man like Tharlo, I think that's the only place he could end up. It's his fate. This character, his fate — it could never have been happy for everyone," Pema Tseden says.

Asked whether the many real people facing this kind of change might get a more optimistic ending, he answered: "That depends on the way you live, on your values. It has something to do with that, doesn't it?"

But change isn't only a matter of leaving. Pema Tseden says many young people in Tibetan areas today are post-90s kids into anime and otaku culture, living the town life the film shows. If anything, he says, they may be further from tradition. "Take young urban Tibetans. They grew up in cities, so they never had a chance to learn Tibetan, and when they step into their own ethnic community they run into a question of identity."

Pema Tseden's son, raised in Beijing, is "trying to find his own identity." In 2014 Pema Tseden sent him back to their hometown for a year at a monastery school. The boy resisted at first, then came to love it. "You could see the change clearly. He gained a sense of belonging to that identity. Otherwise, if you don't know Tibetan, there's a lot you don't understand; you're a Tibetan in name only, in the symbolic sense. And once you're inside, other people keep you at a distance too. But he learned to talk with people, learned the script, made deeper contact with more of them, and they trusted him — so he came to feel he belonged."

"When you enter another environment, it's like opening another window. He could feel a lot of things, then examine himself and see that some of them weren't good. So he adjusted on his own."

His son is back in Beijing now for university, at the Beijing Film Academy as well, and wants to be a director. Pema Tseden says that may be his own influence, though he doesn't yet know what his son wants to film.

Adjusting to a new world, Pema Tseden says, inevitably brings "anxiety, disorientation, confusion." He feels anxious too, "but as I get older that anxiety has gradually eased," because "you come to know a lot of things, and those things let you see certain matters clearly."

Real tensions remain. In June 2016 something unexpected happened to him: the China Film Directors' Guild said on its official Weibo account that Pema Tseden had been taken away by local police at Xining Airport under compulsory measures, had fallen ill in custody and was hospitalized on the 27th. Xining airport police said in their own statement that Pema Tseden had "ignored warnings and forced his way into a restricted airport area to retrieve his luggage, disrupting public order at the airport." In an interview with QDaily, Pema Tseden said the matter "still hasn't been settled," and that "it wasn't a misunderstanding — they have some prejudice."

A few years ago, in interviews, Pema Tseden stressed showing "a pure Tibet." Now he is more likely to say, "First of all I want to make a good film," and to film the Tibetan world as he sees it.

He thinks the fifth film is a step forward from the earlier ones: "This time I drew only Tharlo, one solitary individual. I didn't try to show the world of a whole group of people."

Images from Douban Movie, stills from Tharlo