What Remains of Us

TAKE ONE, March-June, 2005 by Tammy Stone

2004 77m prod Nomadik Films, NFB, p Yves Bisaillon, Francois Prevost, d/sc/ph Francois PrOvost, Hugo Latulippe, ed Annie Jean, s Francois B. Senneville, mus Kalsang Dolma, Tenzin Gonpo, Jamyang, Yungchen Lhamo, Rene Lussier, Techung; with Kalsang Dolma (narrator), Dalai Lama (as himself).

Two firsts, or two new potent a beginnings, open What Remains of Us. Kalsang Dolma, a Tibetan-born woman living in Montreal, prepares to return to the native land she has not seen since early childhood. But her imminent journey is more than one of rediscovery and self-exploration. She has procured a video-taped message of hope from the Dalai Lama--Tibet's spiritual and political leader who went into exile in India in 1959 after China's invasion of his country in 1950--and aims to show it to the Tibetan people the only way she can--covertly.

During the 40 years plus the Tibetan people have not seen their Dalai Lama, Dolma narrates, over 1.2 million Tibetans have been executed by Chinese authorities, who laid claim to the mountain-nestled "Rooftop of the World" not only by physical force but by the sheer power of numbers--more Chinese than Tibetans now comprise a population of 2.7 million. Dolma's mission, and by proxy that of Hugo Latulippe and Francois Prevost, the film's directors, is multifold: to re-expose the people to their leader; to observe, through their reactions to the recorded message, to what extent the Dalai Lama still figures in their lives; and to provide a context for what they observe in Tibet.

The context was perhaps the filmmakers' easiest choice for inclusion and also the easiest to absorb, if only because Tibet has received international attention for decades. Archival images of the 1988 nots and monks burning themselves in protest are iconic; making Tibet a symbol for human rights atrocities proliferating around the globe. Accompanying this chronicle of abuse and redress on is the inaction on the part of international organizations, Dolma finds and reads a letter the Dalai Lama wrote to the UN on November 24. 1950, pleading in vain for help on behalf of his people.

With the plight of Tibetans embedded in the topography of popular and mass culture in the West, the filmmakers faced an interesting challenge--how to humanize a struggle that is abstractly understood and for most of us watching the film, so far away? 0r, inversely, how to delve into the larger issues suggested By the people and scenes captured on film? After all, the presentation of ideas and concepts is not a natural but an extrapolated capacity of cinema. NFB founder John Grierson began an illustrious tradition of documentary in this country on the premise that tim can and should--by the use of voice-over--educate inform and provide an ideological guide. At the other end of the spectrum are the observational documentaries--a technique also initiated by the NFB with light-weight cameras and portable synch-sound equipment--to which What Remains of Us can trace its lineage.

What Remains of Us does make use of Griersonian voice-over; however, the voice belongs not to an authoritative, omniscient being but to Dolma, who (ambiguously) places herself in the action. Curiously, we hardly see Dolma throughout the film. She is off-camera as her message from the Dalai Lama is shown to various groups of Tibetans, from multi-generation nomadic families living in near isolation in the Himalayan mountainside, to monks and young people living in Llasa, Tibet's capital. Indeed, a binary structure of presence/absence manifests itself both formally and thematically throughout the film. Early on, Dolma is on a plane to Tibet, but we don't see her; instead, the camera focuses on a fragment of the plane's wing and the open sky. This simultaneous presence/absence, made more powerful by Dolma's disembodied voice, effectively presages a journey in which being and not being there rises to the surface.

Those confronted by Dolma and her message from the Dalai Lama watch the screen in wide-eyed wonder, never having seen a video-playback machine. Some express feeling more hopeful after seeing and hearing the message (a presence also rendered less there by being broken down and shown in fragments throughout the film), using language that conflates the image of the Dalai Lama with the leader himself; monks mention Buddhist temples that have been destroyed--ruinous, palpable reminders of the absence of freedom; and villagers in traditional Tibetan garb are contrasted with urban youth dressed in Western clothing, who, when asked, offer the year 2000 as the year Tibet lost its freedom. Dolma alludes to the tenets of Buddhism itself (in which presence and absence, suffering and illusion figure prominently) when she wonders if Buddhism's passivity and gentility contributed to the Tibetan oppression.

Quiet and understated in tone, What Remains of Us is most startling for what it is not. More sketch than portrait, the film eschews emotional manipulation to offer an impressionist landscape--both geographical and social--in which despair and faith commingle with everyday life. Speaking of the Dalai Lama, but no doubt echoing Dolma's own position as stranger/native (who has all but willed herself out of the film and into the role of the viewer), a young man says that his leader is far away in body but near in spirit. The film does not ask, but rather invites us to wonder how long this will be the case. To capture a moment in time is also to mark its inevitable passing. What Remains of Us is to be savoured as a visceral contemporary document, an imminent relic and a call to contemplate the space between the two.