Very few Americans ever gained first-hand experience of Chinese politics during the Mao years. Even those few political travelers and ambitious reporters who arrived in Beijing were insulated from the realities of mass campaigns and witch-hunts for internal enemies. These realities were deliberately concealed from foreign visitors the Chinese Communist Party. Instead, the few accounts that did return from the People's Republic of China mostly glowed with accounts of well-run state institutions, improving economic conditions, and the revolutionary wisdom of the Communists.

For the small international community of foreign experts living in China during the Mao years, exposure to the tumult of political upheaval in the name of the revolution could be somewhat more direct. This was certainly the case for Sidney Rittenberg, a South Carolina-born union organizer who became a Communist Party member and direct participant in the Cultural Revolution.  The Cultural Revolution was Communist Party leader Mao Zedong's experiment in revolution without a revolutionary party to lead it. It was, in Rittenberg's account, essentially an object lesson in controlled anarchy whose ultimate outcome for the people of China was death, torture, and spiritual trauma. 

   

 

Reviewed by Constance Rogers. 

Only male perkutut, or zebra doves, sing. And in the very male world of Muslim Indonesia only men raise these sweetly singing birds, that are worth more than their weight in gold. ManDove (sub-titled Real Men Need Doves) introduces the west to the popular Southeast Asian practice of breeding and raising valuable song birds, often Zebra doves, for lucrative competition. Focusing on four Indonesian perkutut farm owners and competitors De Sève and Tjong walk us gently into a world of the men who devote their days and resources to every aspect of their song birds' care.

 

We are taught by one of the men, Prince Prabukusumo, that in Javanese philosophy a man achieves perfection in life by possessing five things: a wife, a house, a dagger, a horse and a bird, preferably a perkutut or zebra dove. The men in ManDove, who share their homes and time with us, have achieved this perfect life. They, and the filmmakers, show us a peaceful, tolerant, middle-class, and a humorous side of Indonesia and Islam that are seldom shown in American media.

 

 

READ MORE...   

 

 

For the first time in Chinese film history, facilitated by digital video technology, Tibet talks back to its metropolitan state in its own voice. Made to represent the Tibetans themselves in their mother tongue, emerging Tibetan cinema, be it documentary or drama, expresses resistance to the pressures of materialistic modernization and market economy imposed by China. 

 

Embrace, directed by Dan Smyer Yu and Pedma Tashi, is a documentary about Tibetan sacred mountains and rivers told by two tantric yogis, father Babu Tashi and son Pedma Norbu, from a remote village in the Amdo area on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Narrated through the religious exposition of a plethora of mountain and water spirits, with detailed descriptions of their arms and appearances, the film is infused with majestic mountain scenery and mystic ritual scenes which, however, are disrupted by messy mining shots in the end. [...]

 

 

If Embrace employs mythology as its method to critique modernization, Old Dog takes demystification as its means to resist commodification. The third feature - after The Silent Holy Stones (2005) and The Search (2009) - of Pema Tseden, the first Tibetan-language filmmaker in China, Old Dog has won several prizes, including the 2011 Golden DV Award at the Hong Kong International Film Festival. A slow, documentary-like, music-free (save songs recorded on the street)movie using sync sound, it tells a simple story from the everyday life of a localsemi-settled herding family. The film's title refers to the Tibetan mastiff, a species that has become the world's most expensive dog worth as much as1.6 million dollars, and hence a hot item on the black market. 

 

 

 READ MORE...   

 

 

 READ MORE...   

 

 

 READ MORE...