Herald Rating: * *
Director: Clemens Kuby
Rating: PG
Running Time: 95 mins
Opens: Now showing Rialto
Review: Peter Calder
A fitting companion piece to The Cup, which alludes far more gently than it might have to the 40-plus years of Chinese occupation of Tibet, this secretly shot made-for-television German documentary includes stunningly exotic footage of the country at the roof of the world.
But it's hampered by a pompous commentary of clearly partisan nature, which underestimates both our intelligence and the subjects' ability to tell their own stories.
Both an intimate ethnography and an exhaustive, if repetitive, introduction to Buddhist beliefs, it includes plenty of information both verbal (the Chinese have razed some 90 per cent of monasteries) and visual (trucks are shown hauling away logs from the country's clearfelled forests). And high in the thin, cold air the camera has captured the most striking pictures. It rewards, but only just, the effort of sitting through the commentary.
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