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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Best films of 2023 in the UK: No 4 – 20 Days in Mariupol

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Filmed as Russia invaded Ukraine’s port city, Mstyslav Chernov’s documentary is gruelling, compelling and vital

Mstyslav Chernov’s horrifying eyewitness documentary 20 Days in Mariupol is about Vladimir Putin’s brutal siege of the Ukrainian port city, from February to May 2022, resulting in more than 20,000 deaths. It is effectively the director’s cut: the gruelling unexpurgated text of this Associated Press journalist’s original video reports from within the city for western news outlets. They were, even in their packaged version, gruellingly tough – and Chernov’s images of mass graves did a very great deal, even in edited form, to galvanise western opinion and to subdue dissenting thoughts that supporting Zelenskiy wasn’t worth it and that Nato had provoked the Russians.

But the full material is wrenching: this film is really a broadcast from hell on earth. Chernov shows in unflinching detail the shattered bodies of men, women and children, and even more unbearably shows the agony of loved ones sobbing over the corpses: a blaze of emotional pain almost obscene in its directness. And Chernov and his photographer Evgeniy Maloletka are themselves part of the story. Their subjects are always reacting to their appearance: sometimes they angrily tell the film-makers to go away. But sometimes, and with almost the same kind of despairing rage, they tell them to stay, to record what they are going through, to be a witness to the horror. Ukrainian troops at one stage rescue Chernov and Maloletka from a hospital in which they had been trapped by snipers. Their capture by Russian personnel would undoubtedly have been a counter-propaganda coup for Putin.

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