A family struggles against the conflicting dictates of nature, spirituality, politics, and free will.

12.1GB | 1h 12m | 1920×1036 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/C31A445256AA175/Balloon.2019.1080p.BluRay.DD+.7.1.x264-LHD.mkv

Language(s):Chinese, Tibetan
Subtitles:English, Chinese

The post Pema Tseden – Qi qiu AKA Balloon (2019) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

This is a story of revenge and redemption.

On an isolated road passing through the vast barren plains of Tibet, a truck driver who has accidentally run over a sheep chances upon a young man who is hitching a ride. As they drive and chat, the truck driver notices that his new friend has a silver dagger strapped to his leg. He comes to understand that this man is out to kill someone who wronged him earlier in life. As he drops the hitchhiker off at a fork in the road, little does the truck driver realize that their short time together has changed everything, and that their destinies are inexorably intertwined.

On the path of life, sometimes we meet someone whose dreams overtake our own to the point that they converge.

5.06GB | 1h 27mn | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/9815D551038365D/Jinpa.2018.1080p.AAC.2.0.h264-SaL.mkv

Language(s):Tibetan
Subtitles:English Hardsubbed

The post Pema Tseden – Zhuang si le yi zhi yang AKA Jinpa (2018) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Cinema-scope.com:
This film uses perfectly framed long takes, from a largely distant yet intimately engaged camera, to tell the story of a film crew driving around Tibet looking for actors to play in a filmed version of the opera. It wraps this quest around two concurrent love stories, and the whole becomes a masterpiece of understated emotional longing set against an urgent desire to preserve a disappearing culture.

1.32GB | 1h 47mn | 712×400 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/56DAEBAB9FD13A4/The_Search_(2009)_-_Pema_Tseden.mkv

Language:Tibetan
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post Pema Tseden – ‘Tsol AKA Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng AKA The Search (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Summary from Icarus Films:
A family on the Himalayan plains discovers their dog is worth a fortune, but selling it comes at a terrible price.

The Tibetan nomad mastiff is an exotic prize dog in China, fetching as much as millions of dollars from wealthy Chinese. When a young man notices several thefts of mastiffs from Tibetan farm families, he decides to sell his family’s dog before it is stolen and sold on the black market. His father, an aging Tibetan herder, is furious when he discovers their dog missing. When the father seeks to buy the dog back, it leads to a series of tragicomic events that threaten to tear the family apart, while showing the erosion of Tibetan culture under the pressures of contemporary society.

Pema Tseden (The Silent Holy Stones, The Search) is the leading filmmaker of a newly emerging Tibetan cinema and the first director in China to film his movies entirely in the Tibetan language. His third feature Old Dog is both a humorous and tragic allegory and a sober depiction of life among the impoverished rural Tibetan community.

1.05GB | 1h 28mn | 846×476 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/DAD86110461F602/Old_Dog_(2011)_-_Pema_Tseden.mkv

Language:Tibetan
Subtitles:English, Chinese hard

The post Pema Tseden – Khyi rgan AKA Lao Gou AKA Old Dog (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
High in the desolate, windswept mountains of Tibet lives a shepherd named Tharlo. He tends his sheep and rides his motorcycle, passing his days in familiar and traditional routines far from the city lights. But when Tharlo travels to the city for an ID card photo and meets Yangtso, a modern young hairdresser, his monastic life will forever change.

Review:
“I know who I am, isn’t that enough?” Tibetan shepherd Tharlo (Shide Nyima) asks his local police chief early in Peme Tseden’s film. He’s left his hillside flock – aside from a lamb in his satchel which he guzzles periodically on a milk bottle – in order to come to town for an ID card. But from the start, Tharlo has no idea how old he is, beyond being past 40, and already has two names. His given one, which he has heard so infrequently that he says it sounds funny and, his nickname, “Ponytail”, acquired from his look. Tseden’s film starts with this uneasiness over Tharlo’s identity, and it is only a matter of time before he strips it back further to expose alienation and loneliness.

Heading into the city to get a photo for his ID, Tharlo waits at the photographers while a couple before him have their snapshots taken against a variety of painted backdrops – including Tianamen Square and New York – in another nod to the conflict between people and the spaces they inhabit, the photographer insists they change into Western clothes to fit in with the fake US backdrop. Charged with getting his hair washed before his photo can be taken, Tharlo makes a fateful visit to the hairdressers across the street, where he meets Yangtso (Yangshik Tso), a much younger woman whose ‘true self’ we suspect but which Tharlo is blind to – a human catalyst for his crisis.

Copy picture
Tseden takes an austere approach to framing, from the crisp black and white lensing of cinematographer Lu Songye to his long, fixed camera takes, with Tharlo almost always present. Despite this, he is rarely at the centre of the frame, more often marginalised to the edges, reinforcing the sense that he doesn’t quite belong. Tharlo’s visit to the city and his life in the hills are brought into sharp contrast by a ‘second act’ in which the shepherd returns to his flock and his outsider loneliness, gulping from liquor bottles with the same fervour that his lamb approached its milk. All the while, the clock is ticking on a return visit to the city.

Tharlo’s state of confusion is emphasised by the vagaries of his memory. He can recite huge chunks of Chairman Mao by rote – the film begins with him offering a monotone litany – but is constantly forgetting everyday items. Tseden also makes the clear distinction between knowing something (or someone) and understanding. The director – who adapted the film from his own short story – litters his films with symbols, from some of the mirrors that crop up showing distorted reflections (a shop sign the wrong way round, for example) and that indicate what Tharlo sees when he looks at Yangtso might not be all it appears, to others – such as a truck wing mirror – which serve to further emphasise his isolation.

This is a slow-burn, low-key film that requires patience on the part of the viewer. Tseden is in no hurry and in no mood to rush to conclusions but his measured pace helps us to invest in Tharlo, whose confusion is conveyed with considerable skill by Nyima, a long-time comedian and theatre actor making a rare foray into film. While some of the devices used – particularly that to symbolise the full stripping away of Tharlo’s sense of self – are familiar and a bit to easily predictable for arthouse regulars, the director employs them adeptly, so that he offers new interest to a well-trodden path.

— Amber Wilkinson (EyeForFilm.co.uk)

2.19GB | 2 h 3 min | 853×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D545844DF047F4C/Tharlo.2015.DVDRip.x264.AC3-Jongl0.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin, Tibetan
Subtitles:English (hardsubs)

The post Pema Tseden – Tharlo (2015) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

From the Buddhist Film Foundation’s website:
Pema Tseden (The Search, Old Dog) is the first Tibetan graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, and this is his dramatic feature debut. Made on location in a village in the Amdo region, the film follows a young lama assigned for Tibetan New Year to attend to the seven-year-old Living Buddha (tulku) of a mountain monastery. The young lamas try to balance their strict training with explorations of the outside world through the novelty of television, and make some surprising choices. Like all great neo-realist films, The Silent Holy Stones has the immediacy of a documentary, and Tseden delivers a compelling and intimate insider’s view of everyday life in his home town.

Comment on the film by the director:
The place where the story took place is none other than my home village, where the mountains and waters have always haunted my dreams. I long to tell the true stories—in my own way—that have come up in my home village, to disclose the real looks of her, and to reveal the genuine conditions of life of the people there…a reciprocal infiltration between tradition and modernism.

Awards:

Grand Jury Prize Changchun Film Festival
Best Director Shanghai International Film Festival
Golden Rooster Award Best Directorial Debut (China)
Official Selection Pusan International Film Festival
Official Selection Hong Kong International Film Festival
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam
Official Selection San Francisco International Film Festival
Official Selection International Buddhist Film Festival

Review from Nathan Southern on Rovi:
Neophyte director Wanma-caidan [Pema Tseden]’s lightly comedic, Tibetan-language drama The Silent Holy Stones (AKA Lhing Vjags Kyi Ma Ni Rdo Vbum) observes the magnetizing forces of Westernization and consumerism for a ten-year-old Chinese boy. Called by his elders to train as a Buddhist monk, and nicknamed Little Lama, the film’s preteen character (Luosang-danpei) finds himself pulled ever strongly in the direction of mass media – to such a degree that he can never quite focus on his studies. He spends the majority of his life in the isolated Guwa monastery, out of the reach of “modern” ways and influences, but a 48-hour holiday New Year’s trip to see his family (that finds his father carrying him across the icy steppes on horseback) represents the breaking point, and once he arrives, no extensive religious ritualizing and amount pleading from his family can tear him away from the family television and VCR, where he remains hooked to the movie Journey to the West. It soon becomes readily apparent to everyone that the boy isn’t exactly tailor-made to forge a devout path. Wanma-caidan uses this smaller story to comment, more broadly, on the passing of traditional cultural lifestyles and religious practices within China.

1.40GB | 1h 37mn | 704×396 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/8D996DDEF147906/The_Silent_Holy_Stones_(Pema_Tseden,_2005).mkv

Language:Amdo Tibetan
Subtitles:English

The post Pema Tseden – Lhing vjags kyi ma ni rdo vbum AKA The Silent Holy Stones (2005) first appeared on Cinema of the World.