Customer Reviews

Tibet - Cry of the Snow Lion [VHS]

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Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add other significant DVDs.

Halfway through this probing, sensitive, sharp, spiritual documentary film I thought to myself, "wow, this is what CIA covert propaganda *should* be able to produce" and then instantly corrected myself: David Ignatius of the Washington Post has it right: overt action is vastly superior to covert action, and in this instance, a loose coalition of kindred spirits have come together in time and focus to produce something remarkable, something much more threatening to Chinese behavior in Tibet than any military armada: a collage of truth-telling.

This is a world-class documentary, full of vivid images, well-blended historical and modern footage, and extremely good production planning and voice over editing. Early on I was struck by the similarity between the Tibetans, the Native Americans, and the Guatemalan Indians, all of whom share some basic moral precepts.

The portrait painted of Tibet as a nation committed to the concept of spiritual education, is a compelling one. One analogy offered up by one of those interviewed I found especially compelling: Tibet was spending 85% of its budget on spiritual development, with 10% of its population in monasteries--this being the equivalent of America redirecting its entire defense budget toward education.

The documentary will clearly infuriate the Chinese, for it carefully itemizes the many ways in which Tibet is uniquely Tibetan, including in its language, greatly distant from Chinese. Shown are Chinese torture instruments, including electrical cattle prods used in the vaginas of nuns and the mouths and throats of monks. The photographs are graphic.

Also covered are the genocide, the torture, imposed by the Chinese, as well as the loss of morality--625 brothels to serve the Chinese garrison.

The documentary carefully covered the death of 30 million Chinese and half the Tibetan population that resulted from Mao Tse Tung's order that Tibet grow wheat instead of barley--shades of the Soviet Union and its failed socialist agriculture.

6,200 monasteries destroyed--as one Tibetan government official in exile notes, this is not just places of worship, but places of scholarship and cradles of a specific civilization.

A section of the documentary focuses on CIA training of the Tibetan resistance, the conclusion of the Tibetans themselves that CIA was not serious, only providing enough support to enable harassment but not victory, and then the coup de grace--Henry Kissinger selling Tibet out for the sake of engagement.

A very powerful section points out that the US, with its 89 billion dollar a year trade imbalance with China, is in fact subsidizing Chinese repression and genocide, not only against Tibet, but against Muslims in China and other separatists elements. US business, according to this documentary, has sold democracy out in favor of profit.

As the documentary drew to an end, I found myself asking again: is this CIA propaganda, as the Chinese would have us believe? Or is the Dalai Lama is fact the representative of a group that may well be the soul of the world, a kernel of hope for non-violent resolution to all that ails us? I found myself wishing that we did indeed have a more effective People's Intelligence Agency (PIA), one that I could trust, one that we could all trust, to actually get the facts right, without political, economic, or cultural manipulation and distortion.

I was educated by this documentary. I had never really thought about Tibet as other than a spiritual oddity. This documentary very effectively points out that it can and should be a zone of peace, not least because it is situated between China and India, two of the most populous nations on earth, between them holding one half of the earth's population, and both of them nuclear *and* poor.

The documentary ends on a high note. It explicitly calls for liberation through knowledge and compassion, and one educator is very effective in pointing out that no one expected apartheid to end in South Africa, or the Berlin Wall to fall, yet both came to pass. Tibet, by this telling, is next.

This is an eye-opening, intelligent, visually-stimulating, and spiritually unnerving documentary. These people--both the observers and the observed--have served us all well.

See also, with reviews:

Peace One Day

The Snow Walker

Lord of War (2-Disc Special Edition)

Syriana (Full Screen Edition)

I knew some of Tibet's history and social ills before picking up this DVD at my local video store. So many actors and artists have made the Tibetans' persecutions known to us that it'd be almost impossible to think most Americans don't have a general understanding of their oppression.

But what most of us probably weren't aware of, is how involved the U.S. was (is) in the demise of the Tibetan way of life. Oh sure! Blame it on the West again! But seriously, think about the following:

In the 1970's, Nixon sent Kissinger on a secret mission to help form guerrilla fighters in Tibet, so that they could fight off the Chinese troops. Then, when Nixon later wanted to open up China for trade, the first thing the U.S. did was break off all connections with those same guerillas, hanging them out to dry.

Move to current day, and we have the U.S. and China in major trade relations. More than $85 billion comes into the U.S. from China. How can Tibet compete against the Almighty Dollar? The fact is, they can't.

Even though the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize for his decision to fight the Chinese government using non-violent acts, even though Tibet is now dedicated to peace and its "true" inhabitants don't lift a finger when troops storm into their monestaries, even though their way of life and their heritage is being picked apart bit by bit, America (and the UN, too) turns a blind eye. $85 million; how do you compete with that?

The final message of the film is uplifting. The narrators mention that Apartheid ended in South Africa and the Berlin Wall fell (even though everyone thought neither of these two things possible). Can Tibet, likewise, be salvaged?

Pray to Buddha that they can.

Okay, enough of the political commentary. Now let's get into the filming of this documentary. It's friggin' AMAZING! The beautiful landscapes, colorful Tibetan dress, haunting musical score, and excellent editing make this a tour-de-force film. The special features on the DVD were also remarkable.

If you pick up ONE documentary this year, I'd highly recommend this one. And not solely because of its message, but because it's beautiful, too.

"Cry of The Snow Lion" is a beautiful documentary of the plight of the people of Tibet before and after the Communist China invasion. It reveals that once again our government's foreign policy is driven by materialism and greed instead of democratic principle and loyalty. Highlights of the film are news clips and interviews with primary sources. This is a well produced "docudrama".

Robert D. Askren,Ph.D.

The great interest of general public in Tibet, expecially from the American point of view, can be dated to the end of the 1980's, when after Nixon's opening to Chinese commerce, Tibet was abandoned to it's tragic destiny by the world's most influential countries. American intellectuals and artists at that moment realized that only publicity and campaigns to stimulate public opinion could help this non belligerant nation to regain its country. In the 1990's, from 1994 to 1997, three Hollywood megaproductions were issued (Little Buddha, Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet). These three movies had great success, sometimes more in the rest of the world than in the USA, but each of them in its own way gave a distorted picture of Tibetan reality from the 1950's up to now.

Somehow James Hilton's vision of Tibet described in the Last Horizon was still working in the subconscious mind of directors such as Bertolucci, Scorsese and Annaud. In the recent years many criticisms have been expressed on this kind of outlook on Tibet and finally also Hollywood has decided to diffuse a well made, educational, modern documentary on Tibet.

The Cry of the Snow Lion is a very rich visual document because interviews with tortured monks and nuns, exiled tibetans, and world specialists on tibetan issues (see John Avedon for example) are interspaced with inserts on Tibetan history and culture.

All the "pieces" are contextualized by a narrating voice that explains and links together the whole documentary.

Facts and figures are meticulously reported: the number of dead, the causes direct and indirect of the happenings, the quantity of the monastaries destroyed and how many Han chinese have immigrated to the country. Rare material is also reported and photographs of the 1950's in their seppia colours and are commented on. I found the interviews particularly interesting, expecially those with protagonists of the period of Chinese invasion, such as Frost and those with modern political commentators.

Naturally, as in most documents of this type, the underlying propaganda is evident, but not fastidious. The sensation one gets at the end is of a 360° outlook on this country and the point where the Tibetan issue is now standing.

I reccomend the vision of the Cry of the Snow Lion to all people over the world, interested in modern history.

Truely a great effort that should be run on TV and more pubblicized.

Even though most people know quite a bit about Tibet, this documentary really puts things into perspective. All countries and people are important, but Tibet's plight is especially poignant: the location of Tibet high in the mountains between China and India, the use of torture by the Chinese, the sell out of US help to Tibet after Nixon "went to China", the images of US politicians shaking hands and smiling with Mao (the biggest mass murderer in the world), and now the huge US trade deficit with China that is funding all this. The images and mechanics of how Tibetans are being marginalized and made into an underclass is evocative of all people who are in this situation. We don't always know how they got that way, but this film shows how Tibetans are moving in that direction.

The fact that Tibet had evolved from a warrior nation to one that spent most of their resources on spiritual enlightenment makes this story relevent to all. The Chinese destroyed over 6000 monastaries and ban the study of Tibetan culture. I hope I live to see the Dalai Lama back in Tibet. If not the current one, then hopefully the Chinese will let the new one out of prison. That was one aspect of the Tibet story I did not know--the Chinese have take the six year old chosen by the current Dalai Lama to be the next Dalai Lama into detention and chose another six year old to be the next Dalai Lama--bizarre.

I just read my child the book "Our Journey from Tibet: Based on a True Story" about a Tibetan family of children who escaped to Dharamsala, India in order to have a Tibetan education and this film followed that story exactly. This was a very good story and got me interested in Tibet. My only complaint is that I wish they had included another disc of this documentary with the graphic images of torture removed so that children could watch this. Children are curious about current events and it would be nice if there were more factual stories for them with graphic images removed.

This beautiful film captures the mystery of Tibetan Buddhism in a way that we of the West can begin to understand. I brought a lot of background knowledge to the subject, but through this film came to understand the place of the monasteries in Tibetan life in a new way. Tibet has no educational system apart from the monasteries; when one reads that 10% of the population consisted of monks and nuns, it's easier to understand if you think of these individuals as involved in cultural and scholarly as well as religious pursuits. In the west these are sharply divided spheres; not so in the east.

The film is astounding in its breadth of material, from what must have been clandestine films of riots and beatings to Chinese military training films. There are numerous interviews of monks and nuns who must no longer be in Tibet. And the pictures of modern Tibet are heartbreaking, especially of the mighty Potala Palace with Chinese kids' rides and fast food vendors cluttering the plaza below. This is how the Chinese have really destroyed the culture; a new rail line to Tibet is imminent, and masses of Chinese are flooding the country, marginalizing the Tibetans and bringing with them the most tawdry aspects of what was once a proud and ancient culture in its own right.

The film makes the point that the Chinese have suffered too. One would think that Tibet could have been left as a peaceful buffer for China from India but that's not the Chinese Communist way. Of course the film is pro-Tibetan, but as usual the history is a bit more complicated. In fact Tibet has always had very close cultural ties with China, and there were Tibetans who encouraged the Chinese. Indeed, the Dalai Lama's predecessor for many years was a stooge of the Chinese. Tibet could not exist in a world of superpowers, but that inescapable fact doesn't lessen the tragedy this film portrays.

Beautifully presented film although it's a documentry. Everyone who's going to visit China or have interest in China MUST see this film.

Apparently it's possible to watch this film and entirely miss the point.

Did some nameless organization declare that this was genocide, or not genocide? Did 1.2 million die, or was it less? Or more? Do the Chinese have some laughable "legal claim" to Tibet (as pronounced by some other nameless organization)? Does somebody somewhere think that the Chinese government doesn't lie that much?

WHO CARES?

Are the Chinese brutally repressing the Tibetans and attempting to destroy their culture? Of course. How do I know? I WATCHED THE FILM. You don't even have to listen to the narration. Just watch the film clips of Tibetan monks being bullied and harassed, the temples being destroyed, the monks attesting to the Chinese methods of torture, the rows of armed Chinese soldiers who attend Tibetan religious celebrations.

But again, this misses the point.

The point is that the Tibetan culture is incredibly beautiful, complex, and spiritually advanced, and to have it destroyed is a crime against humanity. Frankly, the future of the human race depends on the culture of the Tibetan people. Where else would you find someone declaring that they don't hate their torturers, and that they have forgiven them? This movie provides a stunning counterpoint to Western culture, which is steeped in notions of deceit, revenge, and materialism. If for no other reason, watch this movie to see an example of a better way to live.

A great documentary on Tibet. Buy this! Educate yourself and others on this wonderful place and its people. Buy the soundtrack too, amazing, simply amazing!

savetibet.org

This excellent documentary reveals the culture and religion of Tibet as it existed before the Chinese annexation, and then it depicts the subsequent genocide and attempted destruction of the Tibetan Buddhist way of life.

The photography is unsurpassed, and the brutal reality of history is heartbreaking. I watched it three times. It's worth a standing ovation.