Dreams
Single-channel video in which the artist's parents go to sleep on a single mattress on the floor — akin to the one they used when first arriving in the US — within an empty photo studio. The bed seems to be floating mid-air within an erased environment as if any place could be photoshopped around them, heightening the sense of uprooting.
Tenzin Phuntsog
Director
Also Directed by Tenzin Phuntsog
A fictional short that takes its inspiration from Black Yamari, a thangka in the Rubin Museum’s collection. Recalling her childhood memories, a young Tibetan woman living in New York, displaced, questions if all is lost. Realizing that beauty is fleeting, she attempts to find solace in poetry, ancient texts, and art.
A Tibetan-American filmmaker explores modes of resistance to Chinese occupation by speaking with activists across generations. A former Tibetan monk broke his vows and became a guerilla leader. The filmmaker's own mother followed the Dalai Lama's Middle Path and raised her family in America. A young Tibetan man attempted to self-immolate in 2006. How does the filmmaker understand his place in the struggle?
Builds a loose narrative around a long distance conversation between a young Tibetan-American man and his Tibetan-born mother. The character wanders through a natural landscape resembling the exiled homeland of his mother, taking photographs in an attempt to “find a frame that evokes a sense of belonging.” The camera in these works is used as an instrument to reveal the impossibility for displaced Tibetan individuals to be seen in actual Tibetan landscapes.
