The recent Chinese crackdown in Tibet faded from the spotlight after the Sichuan earthquake struck earlier this month. But a group of foreign students in Taipei is determined not to let people forget.
Amnesty International Taiwan’s English Speaking Group is staging the Tibet Film Festival, which runs tomorrow and Sunday at Taipei Artists Village (台北國際藝術村). The event is “aimed at anyone who is concerned about human rights in Tibet,” says Helen Chan, a student at the Mandarin Training Center at National Taiwan Normal University and one of the festival’s organizers.
Keeping a general, English-speaking audience in mind, Chan and her fellow organizers have chosen to show two award-winning films that offer a basic primer on Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion (雪獅之泣) and The Cup (高山上的世界盃).
PHOTO: COURTESY OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL TAIWAN’S ENGLISH SPEAK
The festival kicks off tomorrow with Cry of the Snow Lion, a feature-length documentary that depicts the modern history of the Chinese presence in Tibet. The story is told through contemporary footage filmed on location by an American production team, as well as rare archival footage: in one scene, Mao Zedong (毛澤東) tells a young Dalai Lama that “religion is poison.” The film opens with graphic scenes from the Lhasa demonstrations of 1987, culled from Chinese police footage and images from witnesses and interview testimonies.
The film gives audiences a “big picture” of the situation, says Chan. And the motivation for its screening is not to be “anti-Chinese.” “[We just want] to show how the presence of the Chinese has had an impact on Tibetan life,” she says.
The starkness of Cry is offset by the Bhutanese production The Cup, which shows on Sunday. The story of this light-hearted movie: two 14-year-old Tibetan monks, exiled in India, are gripped by World Cup soccer fever in 1999. The monks fall into a series of misadventures as they sneak out of their monastery late at night to catch the games on television.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL TAIWAN’S ENGLISH SPEAK
The festival also marks a larger effort to promote a general awareness of human rights issues, says Clare Tan, a Mandarin student at National Chengchi University, and one of the event’s organizers.
Tan and Chan are part of a loose coalition of foreign students and non-Mandarin speakers who meet regularly to discuss human rights issues. The group uses the name Amnesty International Taiwan’s English Speaking Group but is not officially affiliated with Amnesty International, although Amnesty International Taiwan lets the group use its name to put weight behind its events.
The group received a positive response with a similar event on Myanmar at the beginning of the year, and hopes to repeat the experience with this weekend’s festival.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL TAIWAN’S ENGLISH SPEAK
And, despite the serious subject matter, the events are a chance for like-minded people to “have fun and enjoy themselves,” says Tan. “I don’t want people to be scared. We want people to come.”
Amnesty International Taiwan’s English Speaking Group’s meetings are open to all. For more information, visit amnestytaipei.wetpaint.com.
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