Tibet in Song

Silenced voices, loud and clear
By Michael O'Sullivan
Friday, November 19, 2010

"Tibet in Song" weaves threads of ethnomusicology and geopolitical history into a compelling personal narrative.

Told in the first person, the documentary is the powerful story of filmmaker Ngawang Choephel, a New York-based, Tibetan-born musicologist by training who returned to his homeland in 1995 to make a movie about the impact of the 1950 Chinese invasion and subsequent occupation on his country's folk music. Under harsh Chinese law, many aspects of Tibetan culture - religion and language, for instance, but most especially music - have been suppressed.

After two months there, the filmmaker was arrested, charged with spying, interrogated for one year and then sentenced to 18 years in prison. He was released in 2002, after international pressure by his mother (backed up by U.S. political muscle and an outcry from such music world celebrities as R.E.M. and Radiohead) forced Chinese authorities to relent.

Choephel's nearly tragic circumstances lend the film a harrowing immediacy. Pictures of Tibetan political prisoners who have been killed are among the film's most shocking images. But Choephel uses his own voice mainly to introduce others even more poignant than his. Those are the voices of Tibetans who have been tortured and threatened with death for something as trivial as, say, refusing to sing the Chinese national anthem.

It's outrageous stuff.

What's the big deal? some might ask. It's just a song. Doesn't the true character of a nation transcend disputes over music? Won't the indomitable spirit of the Tibetan people survive these outside attempts to impose changes that are, when it comes down to it, cosmetic?

Just imagine asking those questions if an invading foreign power were to outlaw - and then alter the lyrics to - "My Country 'Tis of Thee."

A country's identity, Choephel argues, lies deep in its culture. In its native dress, language, religious practice, history and, yes, its songs. The threat of losing it entirely, as this deeply moving film attests is happening, is not just insulting or injurious.

It is, in fact, a kind of death of the soul.

Contains footage of violence, shots of corpses, discussion of torture and brief obscenity. In English and Tibetan with English subtitles.