Territories are always a matter of dispute. Since Hamas coordinated armed incursions into Israeli territory bordering Gaza in late 2023, eyes across the world have been on Palestine, whose people are facing the brunt of a brutally disproportionate fight for land and against Israeli occupation. Something that diminishes them as people and strips them of their rights. It is a ‘David and Goliath’ situation. When world powers such as the US have lent Israel military might, Palestinian citizens are left with Biblical stones to throw at the Israeli army. A similar geopolitical situation prevails closer home in Tibet, which is battling a six-decade-old occupation by China. But it rarely makes it to the headlines in India. Veteran filmmakers Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin have, however, been spreading awareness across the world about the situation in Tibet for decades now.
‘Shadow Circus’, an ongoing exhibition at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, looks at the history of the armed Tibetan resistance, which collapsed in 1974 when its “last stronghold in the mountain kingdom of Mustang on the Nepal-Tibet border was shut down by the Nepalese army”, through a personal archive of photographs, documents, maps, audio-visual material and correspondences of Sonam’s late father, Lhamo Tsering, a leader of the movement. Tsering was also the key liaison between the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Tibetan resistance during one of the longest covert operations the CIA has carried out in the eastern hemisphere. Codenamed STCIRCUS, the operation involved training and providing weapons to Tibetans for their fight against the Chinese.
Freedom fighter in exile
The exhibition features screenings of multiple movies by the filmmakers, including documentaries and feature films, all made under the banner of their production house, White Crane Films, on the various aspects of …read more
Source:: News Wire