"My intent is to expand upon the concept of “resistance” looking beyond the conventional definition, looking more closely at the philosophical, psychological and internal aspects." 

Tenzin Phuntsog

In the past six decades some 400,000 Tibetans have died in a forlorn attempt to preserve their independence. Tibet remains as one of the last countries colonized and occupied by an imperialist military force in the 20th Century. In October 1950, under threat of war, the Tibetans were forced to sign the 17 Point Agreement in which the invading Chinese government promised to respect Tibetan religion and culture. These, and many other promises, were systematically broken, resulting in what is known as Twenty Years War.

Tenzin Phuntsong and Joy Dietrich, who are the directors of Rituals of Resistance, spoke of particular political events, family experiences, and archival materials that became crucial in the making of their film about Tibet’s occupation during the Margaret Mead film festival in New York City. Rituals of Resistance can be considered one of the most compelling documentaries of the festival and perhaps of the year.

The Dalai Lama fled Tibet after the Chinese invasion in 1950.Since then, thousands of Tibetans continue as nomads inside and outside their own land. The new film by Phuntsong and Dietrich explores these transitions and the aftermath of the Chinese invasion, and how the Tibetan culture has been subjected to a systematic process of eradication.

Whether Tibetans stayed or left their country after the occupation, they all lost their families, their heritage, and their land. The Tibetan community in India suffers from the twin traumas of loss of homeland and stateless refugee existence. Dietrich and Phuntsong’s masterful use of archival materials in Rituals of Resistance delivers a profound experience to the viewer through an essential historical approach of the Chinese occupation in Tibet, the role of religion and the Dalai Lama’s position in the political conflict, as well as the migration process of thousands of Tibetans.

Although most Tibetans have historically embraced the non-violent approach that the Dalai Lama advocates, some of them chose to respond to the abuse and violence of the military regime differently. This dialectic or human conflict is precisely the premise of a film that meditates on the Middle Path within the Buddhist Tradition, and the reality of exiles and Tibetan nomads  who lost everything after the Chinese invasion. The directors look closely to three life stories to address the historical events and the personal involvement of each exile. 

In the first story, a Tibetan monk, who now lives in Nepal, shares his journey from being a monk and later breaking his vows to join the guerrillas against the Chinese military. During the interview, there is a breathless moment when the former monk admits that he actually had to kill during a defense military action. After stating that, he stops and looks away lost in thought, then he admits how this path wasn’t the one for him. Each story has a powerful effect, capturing the vulnerability and desire of each exile to return to their stolen homeland.

The wish to return is represented in the second story, where Phuntsong’s mother is interviewed. She embraced the Middle Path and emigrated from India to the United States with her husband, who became a university professor. Years later, she discovers that her brother and her sister are alive in Tibet and decides to travel to her hometown, even while knowing that she is risking her own life. This portrayal is highly emotional and dramatic because it takes the audience along with her in a jeep to visit her brother and sister in a remote village in the Tibetan mountains. The stakes are very high and the viewer feels absolutely invested in the journey of this exile. At one point, a Chinese official stops the car at one checkpoint and starts asking questions. A single minute feels like an eternity for each passenger inside the jeep. Miraculously, at the second checkpoint, a sudden avalanche of dirt abruptly cascades down, and the driver makes a decision to continue through the checkpoint while the officials are distracted in order to protect both the passenger and his own life. 

In the third story, a young Tibetan man who lives in India reports how he ran away from Tibet at a very young age and became and exile in India. Many years later, in 2016, he attempted to set himself on fire when the Chinese president was visiting India. This attempt at self-immolation was to call the attention of the world to the Chinesse occupation in Tibet. 

The archival materials that appear in each story strengthen the overall narrative and brings to life essential historical events. Phuntsog founded the Tibet Film Archive when he lived in New York. It is a restoration project preserving film footage of Tibet pre Chinese occupation and early exile, dating from 1920 through 1991. 

Phuntosong explains, “I saw these films that needed to be restored and I said, ‘We have to restore them.’ I wasn’t a film archivist at the time.” Phuntsog studied film restoration at the Cineteca Bologna in Italy and eventually founded the Tibet Film Archive, of which he is also the director. “Restoring a film is really a labor of love,” he said. “You’re doing all this work just so that one day it’s preserved and that when people do want to watch it, it’s there,” he adds.

The history of colonization is one of abuse and arbitrary practices that violate the rights of each individual and their land. Rituals of Resistance is concerned not only with the systematic practices within these regimes, but also establishes crucial questions regarding the role of philosophy and the arts in the Tibetan community. “Tibet was the only ancient culture to survive intact into modern times', whose roots are lost in antiquity,” as Fosco Morraine observed.

According to Paul Ingram, “the Chinese stated that they “had come to help the Tibetans and introduce them to the ways of civilization,” the classic justification for colonization and empire. Tibet has now been practically destroyed by the Chinese, “when they were ideally suited to bring this unique Tantric Buddhist culture gently into the 20th century.” Tibet is now a huge military base, having an army of occupation of nearly half a million, together with nuclear missile bases, such as the one at Nagchuka, and parts of Tibet suffer from radiation and industrial pollution.

As the film unfolds, a sense of absolute indignation grows while contemplating how nothing has really been done by the world authorities and most powerful countries to help solve this conflict. Although during the 1990s “Tibet was a cause célèbre,” in the words of Tsering D. Gurung, where actors like Richard Were used the Academy Awards to call attention to the situation, and the first Free Tibet concert took place in San Francisco, this battle has weakened dramatically over the decades. The fast growth of the Chinese economy and reliance on the West have contribute to that.