State of Statelessness review – Dalai Lama presides over intimate dramas about Tibetans’ life of exile

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Tibetan directors, who all live outside Tibet, deliver a quartet of films that explore the pain of separation and migration The wrench of exile is the theme of this quartet of short films from Tibetan directors, who themselves all live outside Tibet. Their intimate, emotional family dramas tell stories of separation and migration. In two of them, the 90-year-old Dalai Lama smiles out from photographs on shrines, a reminder of the precariousness of Tibet’s future. As a character in one of the films puts it bluntly: will there be anything to stop China erasing Tibetan identity when its rock-star spiritual leader is no longer around? In the first film a Tibetan man lives in a kind of complicated happiness in Vietnam. He loves his wife, and they both adore their sunny-natured little daughter, but he has mournful eyes. Home is a town on the banks of the Mekong River, which has its source in Tibet. The river is a constant reminder of the region – and of Chinese might too, since Chinese hyd...
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Hugh Hudson: smash-hit pop classic Chariots of Fire director was a hero of British film

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Hudson brought an ad-man’s eye to the brilliant 1981 drama about athletics and bigotry, as well as directing the hilarious Cinzano commercials

As the 1980s dawned, British ad director Hugh Hudson took on his first feature film and made it a legendary hit: an inspirational story which supplied a sugar-rush of patriotism and a swoon of nostalgia which hit the spot both sides of the Atlantic. It somehow brought off the trick of being about the underdog and the victim of bigotry and religious discrimination – and yet also being a resounding endorsement of the status quo which could, on grounds of decency and meritocracy, always accommodate the outsider. This was the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the ethos of success for the hardworking and the deserving.

The film of course was Chariots of Fire, the true story of the 1924 Olympic runners Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross), a Jew who ran to defy prejudice, and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a devout Christian who found a creationist glory in his speed. It was the destiny of so many involved to be forever associated chiefly, or solely, with this smash-hit pop classic: certainly Cross and Charleson never again found roles to match Abrahams and Liddell. And maybe Hudson himself never again had a triumph like it: though he was no one-hit wonder, later directing the Oscar-winning Tarzan drama Greystoke, and later Revolution, an epic about the American revolution starring Al Pacino which was derided but then grew in acclaim, giving his Hudson his own misunderstood masterpiece moment.

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