Indian-Tibetan filmmakers and artists Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam are based in Dharamshala, India. They have been working together for more than 30 years. Their work includes award-winning films and art installations. A recurring subject in their work is Tibet, with which they have been intimately involved; personally, politically and artistically. Their documentary, The Sun Behind the Clouds (2009), won the Vaclav Havel Award at the One World Film Festival in Prague. Their Tibetan-language feature films, Dreaming Lhasa (2005) and The Sweet Requiem (2018) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Their art work has shown widely, including at: Berlinale Forum Expanded, Contour Biennale, Busan Biennale, Mori Art Museum, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and Khoj Studios. They are also the directors of the Dharamshala International Film Festival, which they founded in 2012 and is now one of India’s leading independent film festivals.
RITU SARIN AND MY TENZING SONUM
TIBET / INDIA
Drapchi Elegy, 2017. Single-channel video with sound, 16 minutes 44 seconds.
Supported by Contour Biennale, the Gujral Foundation, and Argos Centre of Art and Media.
Drapchi Elegy weaves together vignettes from the everyday life of Namdol Lhamo, an anonymous exile living in Brussels who happens to be one of the famous Singing Nuns of Drapchi, a group of 14 nuns imprisoned in Tibet in the early 1990s for peacefully demonstrating against Chinese rule. Namdol Lhamo’s sentence, along with that of her companions, was further increased when they were discovered to be secretly recording protest songs in Drapchi Prison and smuggling the tapes to the outside world. She spent a total of 12 years in prison. The video is shown in conjunction with: four banners depicting the Tibetan lyrics of one of the songs from Drapchi Prison, along with their translations in English and Turkish; photographs of Drapchi prison; the court order sentencing the 14 nuns to additional prison terms.
