Filmmaker Tenzing Sonam's portrait of Tibetans in India, codirected with his wife, Ritu Sarin, draws on his own family's experiences to tell the story of an American-born documentarian of Tibetan descent who comes to Dharamsala — the seat of the Dalai Lama's Tibetan government — to make a film and becomes entangled in a real-life mystery.
New York-based filmmaker Karma (Tenzin Chokyi Gyatso) intends to make a documentary about survivors of the Tibetan resistance movement who overcame brutal imprisonment by the Chinese government. She hires a local man, Jigme (Tenzin Jigme), as an assistant and has begun conducting interviews when she meets the middle-aged former monk Dhondup (Jampa Kalsang), who asks her help in fulfilling his dying mother's last wish: that he make the dangerous trip from Tibet to India, find a man named Loga and give him a silver charm box. Intrigued, Karma appeals to her connections in the Tibetan refugee community and picks up Loga's trail. Unfortunately, Loga vanished 15 years earlier and is widely presumed dead. But his wife, Dekyi, believes otherwise and advises them to go to Delhi and speak with a man named Tse Topgyal. Loga went to see him shortly before disappearing, and she has always held Tse Topgyal responsible for whatever happened. Setting her own project aside and ignoring Jigme's warnings that those ex-monks are slippery characters who ingratiate themselves to Americans in hopes of finding a way to emigrate to the U.S., Karma accompanies Dhondup on a trip through India's far-flung Tibetan refugee community, uncovering the story of Loga's life in Tibet and following clues about his present-day whereabouts that lead to one dead end after another. Karma is also forced to examine her own feelings about the homeland she's never seen: She may think of herself as Tibetan, but in the Tibetan community she's first and foremost American.
Sonam, a documentary filmmaker, was raised in Darjeeling and much of Loga's history reflects things he learned about his own father's role in the Tibetan resistance while researching The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet (1998). In 1996, he and Ritu took up temporary residence in Dharamsala, where they were inspired to make a film about Tibetan exiles torn between the country their parents raised them to love and their own immersion in the cultures of their adopted countries. The result, however, is a film that becomes more interesting as it goes on, but is so undermined by wooden performances and an awkward, episodic structure that many viewers won't stay with it that long. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh