Cinereach grant recipient Summer Pasture, a film by Lynn True, Nelson Walker & Tsering Perlo, will have its World Premiere at the upcoming Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on Sat. April 10th @ 1:30pm at Cinema Four @ the Durham Convention Center. The filmmakers will be in attendance.
Yama from the film "Summer Pasture"
Summer Pasture provides a deeply personal account of what it means to be a nomad for a young Tibetan family in a swiftly modernizing world. With rare access to an area seldom visited by outsiders in the highlands of Tibet, Summer Pasture offers an unprecedented window into the most traditional of ancient cultures, deftly capturing a young couple on the precipice; will they succumb to the lure of modern city life or will they continue to follow the yak’s tail?
Although nomadic society may seem distant from everything we know, in another way it is instantly understandable, because we know about parents and children, about working to put food on the table, and about travails with illness and infidelity. Here is a film that is about life itself, and about those few humans who still engage it at first hand.
“Our aim was to create a film that honestly and intimately shares the everyday challenges and experiences of nomadic life, and in doing so, offer a unique alternative to the abundance of purely religious or politicized films about Tibetans.” – Directors Lynn True & Nelson Walker
The project was supported by partners including: the Sundance Documentary Film Program, Cinereach, Center for Asian American Media with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NY State Council on the Arts, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, IDA Pare Lorentz Finishing Fund and the NY Community Trust.
Making of the film…
Summer Pasture was conceived as part of the Kham Film Project, an association of American and Tibetan filmmakers working together to improve the quality and diversity of knowledge about Tibet by engaging Tibetans in the filmmaking process. While filming in Tibet, the filmmakers partnered with Rabsal, a local NGO dedicated to using film and multimedia as a means of Tibetan self-representation. Tsering Perlo, the founder of Rabsal and an emerging documentary filmmaker himself, is a principal collaborator on the project and grew up in the nomadic community depicted in the film.
About the Filmmakers…
Another unique aspect of this story are the filmmakers themselves – aside from being accomplished documentary filmmakers (LUMO, P.O.V. 2007), True and Walker have worked extensively in Tibet facilitating participatory video projects and contributing to the Tibetan Himalayan Digital Library. They are also film programmers at New York’s Maysles Cinema in Harlem and are co-founders and directors of the Tibet in Harlem and Congo in Harlem film festivals.