What Does Tibetan Identity Mean to Director Lhapal Gyal? | How I Became a Director, Part 3

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Lhapal Gyal was born and raised in a pastoral area of Hainan Prefecture, Qinghai Province, and in every sense being Tibetan has become a label on this director that won't wash off. But in Wangdrak's Rain Boots (《旺扎的雨靴》), the film he brought into competition at this year's FIRST International Film Festival, he made no deliberate effort to build the story on Tibetan elements.

The film's protagonist, a boy named Wangdrak, is a first-grader. He has no rain boots, so every rainy day leaves his shoes caked in mud. His classmates shut him out and laugh at him, and he comes to want a pair of rain boots more than anything. One day his mother trades away a sheepskin that was meant to buy two sickles and brings him a pair of boots instead. After that he starts praying for a downpour, so he'll finally get the chance to put them on and run through the rain.

"A lot of kids get fixated on one particular thing and want it badly," Lhapal Gyal said. He had the same experience as a child, desperate for a pair of new sneakers, and that became the first impulse behind making this film.

Lhapal Gyal believes the feeling is universal. He has said again and again, in one setting after another, that when Wangdrak's Rain Boots screened earlier at the Berlin International Film Festival, many children loved it and understood what it was trying to say.

The Tibetan region mostly serves as a backdrop, supplying the film with richer narrative threads. The villagers farm, and it's harvest season, so Wangdrak's father doesn't want heavy rain. The village lama, going along with the villagers' wishes, wants to chant sutras to drive the rain away. When hail threatens, the village holds a meeting and opinion splits in two: one side wants a ritual to pray for blessings, the other wants to go to the township government for help with anti-hail cannons.

Lhapal Gyal doesn't turn life in a Tibetan region into a spectacle, and he doesn't put Tibetan identity at the center of the story's conflict. Instead he strings together the many sides of that life through a child's eyes. Wangdrak's Rain Boots is calm and restrained enough that many people don't see it as a "Tibetan film" at all, comparing it instead to children's films, especially Iranian ones.

Over the past few years, films with Tibetan subjects have started to break through in the market. In late 2016, Pema Tseden's Tharlo opened in theaters; before that he had made four films, none of which got a formal theatrical release. In 2017, Zhang Yang's Paths of the Soul and Soul on a String came out one after the other. The first caused a stir among a small circle of moviegoers and eventually took in more than 100 million yuan.

The two directors' motives may differ, but both share a concern for Tibetan culture. When Tharlo was released, Pema Tseden told QDaily he hoped his work could reflect traditional Tibetan culture: "The religion and the various traditional cultures of Tibetan regions are unique — vast and inclusive." Zhang Yang, for his part, feels close to Tibetan culture and wanted to show "things that could happen in life, or things that really did happen."

What Lhapal Gyal cares about in filmmaking is closer to the ground: things tied to his own life. And his own life happens to be set in a Tibetan region.

Lhapal Gyal was born in a Tibetan pastoral area and grew up nomadic. In summer the whole family moved with the herds to the grasslands; in winter they returned to a more or less fixed spot to wait out the cold. In elementary school it took him two or three hours on horseback to get from home to school, so he lived instead with his older brother, who taught at the township school.

His brother's family watched television every night, and the cartoon Big Head Son and Small Head Dad (《大头儿子和小头爸爸》) is what stayed with him most. Lhapal Gyal worked pieces of it into Wangdrak's Rain Boots to hint at the relationship between Wangdrak and his father. He also remembers that the village Party secretary's family had a video player that ran the TV series Journey to the West, and he put the Rain God from Journey to the West into the film as a device to push the plot along.

As a child he saw few movies. In the 1990s and early 2000s, commercial cinemas and theater chains existed only in cities. To screen a film in the countryside, a projectionist had to haul a projector and a screen down to the village by bicycle or motorcycle. What played most often were the old War of Resistance films; Lhapal Gyal watched them, but they never sparked much interest.

He only began to learn about film in high school. One day a teacher mentioned, out of nowhere, that his old classmate Pema Tseden had made a movie and given an interview on CCTV's Movie Channel. That day the school swapped its news-watching slot for Pema Tseden's interview. Afterward Lhapal Gyal decided to track down the film itself and watch it. That was the first time film genuinely interested him, and the idea of studying it took hold.

Pema Tseden had only recently started making films. His first, The Silent Holy Stones, was completed in 2005, followed by The Search in 2007 and Old Dog in 2010. As his influence grew, he pulled along a group of Tibetan filmmakers, including Sonthar Gyal and Dukar Tserang. Together they became known as the "Tibetan New Wave" directors.

Lhapal Gyal remembers that in those years the Tibetan New Wave was what first drew attention to film within Tibetan regions. It drew him in too. "A lot of the movies I'd watched before felt far from my own life and customs in every way. After I saw Teacher Wanma's films, they felt much closer to my life."

The passion arrived all at once. In 2010, Lhapal Gyal graduated from high school and was admitted to the physics department at Qinghai Minzu University. Looking back, he still thinks teaching is a great profession, but "back then I was at an age full of passion. If I studied physics, I'd probably end up a teacher too, and I thought that would be too boring — repeating the same thing every time."

He gave up the chance to study physics. No one around him could understand it. His father didn't approve of him studying film at first, and his teacher wondered whether Lhapal Gyal was worried about tuition money. He made up his mind anyway, went to Beijing alone, rented a room three floors underground for a few hundred yuan, and began auditing classes at the Beijing Film Academy.

The most famous case of someone becoming a director by auditing classes is Jia Zhangke. In 1993 the Beijing Film Academy changed its rules to allow one auditing student per class; Jia Zhangke was one of them, and two years later he was admitted as a regular student. The academy later dropped the policy. Now auditing mostly means knowing a class is about to start, walking in, and finding a seat.

Lhapal Gyal audited for a year, mostly large lecture courses. He still speaks fondly of the classes taught by Xie Fei, Xu Haofeng, Chen Shan and Han Xiao, and he bought books on his own to work through the concepts. He found the courses useful, though he had grown up studying at a Tibetan-language school and ran into a language barrier.

A year later he went back to Qinghai. Through his brother he met Pema Tseden, who cared about him but didn't approve of the route he'd taken. Pema Tseden felt Lhapal Gyal, not long out of high school, was still too young. If he really wanted to make films one day, he should go study some literature first.

The advice came out of Pema Tseden's own life. Before he started making films he had spent four years teaching elementary school, then tested into the Tibetan language department at Northwest Minzu University, worked as a civil servant, earned a master's degree in Chinese-Tibetan translation, and only in 2002 became a graduate student at the Beijing Film Academy. He was pointing Lhapal Gyal down the road he had walked himself.

Lhapal Gyal thought he was right. In 2011, on Pema Tseden's recommendation, he enrolled in the Tibetan literature department at Northwest Minzu University — a program much like an associate-to-bachelor's upgrade track, but demanding. Over two years he read a great deal of Tibetan-language literature, and he feels it widened his sense of literature, film and other art forms, letting him read more, and more deeply, into a work.

Two years later the Tibetan literature program ended. Lhapal Gyal returned to the Beijing Film Academy as an associate-to-bachelor's transfer student and formally began studying film. That, he says, was the start of watching, encountering and studying film systematically.

Lhapal Gyal thinks the theory he learned at film school matters a great deal, but alongside it he looked for work on film crews. Beyond wanting to see how a production actually runs, there was a practical reason: living expenses. "I felt I was too heavy a burden on my family. If I hadn't gone to study film, I'd probably be out working and earning money already."

At first the only crew job he could get was director's assistant — and a "personal-life" assistant at that, the kind of work that meant "carrying a stool for the director, filling a kettle with water." But staying at the director's side let him watch everything a director has to do to hold a whole crew together, and that became the basis for how he ran his own crews once he was directing.

As his experience grew, he got chances at other jobs on set: Tibetan interpreter, then script supervisor, then assistant director helping coordinate the Tibetan actors. Then in 2015 he joined the crew of Pema Tseden's Tharlo as executive director — the person who helps the director carry out his ideas on set, talking to every department.

"I was still at school then, and Teacher Wanma told me, come over, come join my crew," Lhapal Gyal recalls. Pema Tseden had in effect brought him into his own filmmaking circle. Besides making him executive director on Tharlo, he recommended Lhapal Gyal for the same job on another film he produced, Knife in the Clear Water. Lhapal Gyal calls Pema Tseden his "guiding light," and this time, on Wangdrak's Rain Boots, Pema Tseden served as producer again.

The crew of Wangdrak's Rain Boots was, in fact, Pema Tseden's regular team. Director of photography Lü Songye also shot Tharlo. So did executive producer Qin Ling, gaffer Gu Chun and production designer Tenzin Nyima, along with their shared literary consultant, Tsering Dondrub. Wangdrak's Rain Boots is adapted from Tsering Dondrub's short story of the same name.

That once worried some people interested in investing in the film. They felt so strong an existing team would weaken the director's control, and they even proposed that Lhapal Gyal replace cinematographer Lü Songye with a classmate from film school. He refused. Because he and Lü had already worked together many times, he believed that history was the best possible foundation for making this film together.

By now Lhapal Gyal and Pema Tseden have built a close working relationship, and they plan to collaborate on more films.

Lhapal Gyal is unwilling to stick a Tibetan label on a team like this. Asked whether the film industry has some kind of divide between Han and Tibetan filmmakers, he pointed out that many crews include Han members — Lü Songye, who shot Wangdrak's Rain Boots; Luo Pan, who shot The Sacred Arrow (《五彩神箭》), an earlier film directed by Pema Tseden; and several films directed by Sonthar Gyal.

The so-called circle, Lhapal Gyal explains, is a feature built into the film industry itself — "people always prefer to work with those who think the way they do" — and that holds for Han and Tibetan alike. He refuses to sum up the whole phenomenon as a simple Han-versus-Tibetan opposition, and he stresses that the ways Han and Tibetan people live are for the most part more alike than not, nothing like the vast gulf outsiders imagine.

But the Tibetan region remains a backdrop he can't ignore. As he has put it, "For now I'll go on making films about Tibetan regions, mainly because I grew up on this land myself and understand its way of life, its customs and its culture better."

In 2015, Lhapal Gyal set about turning Tsering Dondrub's story into a screenplay, preparing his first feature.

The script was finished in 2016, and he submitted it to a Beijing Film Academy program that supports outstanding young screenwriters. That May the results were announced, and Wangdrak's Rain Boots was one of ten winning scripts.

That same year the academy's Youth Film Studio partnered with the program: it would take on the winning scripts and look for chances to turn them into films. Lhapal Gyal got lucky — Wangdrak's Rain Boots was picked. In early 2017 the Youth Film Studio started raising money for it. The process didn't go smoothly, and Lhapal Gyal met one investor after another. In the end Haining Yuanshi Culture Media Co., Ltd., a Zhejiang company that mainly makes TV dramas, became the lead investor, with the Youth Film Studio and Qinghai Kawajian Film & Culture Communication Co., Ltd. as co-producers.

Shooting began in July 2017. The crew found a Tibetan village more than 300 years old in Taga Township, Hualong County, Haidong, Qinghai. It looked old and was well preserved; there were marks of modern life, tall towers among them, but careful framing could keep them out. Lhapal Gyal wanted the film to show what Tibetan regions looked like a dozen or more years ago.

The film leans on clear days, rainy days and overcast days to drive and reveal the changes in Wangdrak's mind over the course of the story. The crew was lucky and caught all of that weather. A shoot planned for 40 days finished in 28. By late August the film had wrapped. Post-production came in just in time for the Berlin International Film Festival; after it was entered, it was selected for the 2018 Berlinale's Generation competition section.

Since then Lhapal Gyal's life has gotten far busier. Interviews and public events take up his days, and only at night does he get to watch films and read on his own. When he is in front of an audience, the outside interest in his Tibetan identity seems to far outweigh interest in how that identity appears in the film.

At the post-screening Q&A for Wangdrak's Rain Boots at the FIRST International Film Festival, even after the moderator praised the film for telling a child's story in a more universal way, the audience's questions still circled largely around the Tibetan elements on screen: the Buddhist statues, the lama chanting to drive off the rain.

"I think every viewer's cultural background, age and way of life are different, so everyone understands the film differently. Children see Wangdrak's desire; adults see a cultural clash; some people see the relationship between father and son, or modernity and tradition, or people and nature. You can feel that people read this film on different levels." Answering these questions, Lhapal Gyal never gave his own reading, steering the audience toward an open-ended answer instead.

Even so, you can sense what being Tibetan does for him. For the Q&A he changed into traditional Tibetan dress, and at one point someone came up to present him with a khata.

Lhapal Gyal has his own concerns about Tibetan regions. On the way some films turn life there into spectacle, he sees a film pandering to non-Tibetan audiences' appetite for the exotic. He feels anxious about the cultural loss that modernization has brought to Tibetan regions. And he hopes films about ethnic minorities will get more attention.

As he says, what he cares about is film rooted in everyday life. And the Tibetan region is his life.