The Silk Road House presents: "THE SALTMEN OF TIBET" German filmmaker, director and writer Ulrike Koch is a sinologist (her previous film dealt with Chinese medicine) who made this 1997 documentary on digital video with a small crew in northern Tibet. She also worked on the Bernardo Bertolucci films ''The Last Emperor'' and ''Little Buddha.'' For this Swiss-German production, she sneaked cameras into Changtang region in order to film four men and 160 yak in a 2,000-year-old ritual -- the annual spring pilgrimage to gather raw salt at remote lakes, a three-month Himalayan trek. The wind is a constant presence, and so are the looming, snow-covered peaks. This nomadic tribe has been collecting salt to buy barley in the same way since ages. All is ritualized: Margen cooks, Pargen prepares burnt offerings and distributes meat, Zopon cares for the caravan of yaks, Bopsa bends his strong back to arduous work. To each other they speak the secret language of saltmen. Camping along the way, they engage in prayers, talk, and songs. The saltmen are a fraternity, and there are initiation rites. The men play assigned roles: “mother,'' `”father'' and “novice,'' and we gather that there must always be a novice to reinforce the idea of seeing familiar things as if for the first time. The sounds we hear are the men chanting, bells and the deep foghorn blasts of resonant instruments. Punctuating the movie are excerpts from the story of King Gesar of Ling, a national Tibetan epic, hauntingly sung by an unidentified female shaman who is a member of the tribe.
Director of photography, Pio Corradi; music by Stefan Wulff and Frank Wulff; produced by Christophe Bicker and Knut Winkler; released by Zeitgeist Films. Stars: Margen (Old Mother), Pargen (Old Father), Zopon (Lord of the Animals). Language -- in Tibetan, with English subtitles. Running time: 110 minutes. The screening will be introduced and commented on by Alma Kunanbaeva.
July 9th, Saturday, 5-7pm
Fuente: The Silk Road House
