A coming of age Tibetan film tries to capture the edgy, Dil Chahta Hai-esque element. Devyani Onial gets a peek
‘‘IT could become a regional Bend It Like Beckham,’’ says Rupin Dang optimistically. That’s the kind of breakthrough Tibetan cinema needs, six years after the Martin Scorcese-directed Kundun and the Brad Pitt starrer Seven Years in Tibet took niche audiences into the Forbidden City. But they also need a Dil Chahta Hai, an edgy, coming of age movie that places Tibetan youth firmly in a contemporary world. An ambitious proposal all right, but that doesn’t deter Dang of Wilderness Films, or his director, Pema Dhondup, the man who’s wielding the microphone for The Four Harmonious Friends. Forget panoramic shots of monasteries, benevolent lamas and picturesque landscape. The Four Harmonious Friends is an unromantic contemporary cocktail of unemployment, divorce, parental friction and, inevitably, the lure of the West. Occupying centrestage are four friends, who meet in a cafe in Dharamsala and talk over their lives. With a modest budget of Rs 90 lakh, the film features mostly unknown faces, with the notable exception of Gulshan Grover, who plays a tough cop.
At a night shoot in the dimly-lit winding lanes of the Tibetan Colony in Delhi, an Odomos tube does the rounds as the unit waits for a store to shut and the streets to empty before filming a robbery scene. ‘‘Until now all Tibetan films have been about history, monasteries and the Chinese occupation,’’ says Sonam Wangdue, the protagonist of The Four Harmonious Friends. ‘‘This is really the first film about Tibetans in exile.’’
Sonam plays a young man who refuses to abide by his father’s wishes and join the Tibetan government-in-exile. He has just one aim: to get to the US. An aim, Sonam says, shared by many young Tibetans, for whom the US is the only way out of an economic dead-end.
Much of the anger and the frustration that the characters portray on screen are emotions director Dhondup is familiar with. One character in the film, for instance, supports an ‘‘unfashionable’’ hardline approach to the Tibetan problem, as opposed to path of peace by the Dalai Lama. ‘‘There is this sense of frustration about what we’re doing… Many of our youth feel the best way is to pick up arms, to become terrorists.’’ It’s a strong urge that Dhondup is not entirely unfamiliar with.
The film is in Tibetan and a smattering of Hindi and English with English sub-titles, and is aimed primarily at the West. ‘‘It has a strong message,’’ says the director. ‘‘The message is that we have to examine what we really want and stay together as a community to get it.’’
A Fulbright scholar, Dhondup graduated from the University of Southern California last year. While at film school, he wrote the basic story for what would evolve into The Four…. ‘‘That was also when I met Gulshan Grover. I told him my story, and he became interested in the project. We shot with him for one week in McLeodgunj,’’ says Dhondup. Grover, playing a no-nonsense cop who firmly believes all Tibetan youth dabble in drugs, has only one worry now: that a lot of Tibetans will hate him after seeing the film.
The rest of the unit may be inexperienced, but they are a passionate lot, says Dhondup. In fact, when actors ran short, crew-members stepped in for the bit parts. ‘‘One guy played five different people!’’ laughs Kimberly Dukes, who is assisting on the project. A student of visual anthropology in Philadelphia, Kimberly got roped into the project while she was interviewing Dhondup on his cinema career.
With the shooting wrapped, Dhondup and Dang are looking at an international release around November.
And fingers are crossed that the story of a Tibetan community in India will find worldwide acceptance even without the exotic masks and customary roll of drums that so long drowned the real concerns of a generation in exile.
