Dharamsala to host film festival

DHARAMSALA - The fifth three-day Free Spirit Film Festival will be organised in this Himachal Pradesh hill station from Dec 10, an organiser said Wednesday.

“The annual Free Spirit Film Festival will begin with the screening of Jeff Daniels’ ‘The 10 Conditions of Love’ Dec 10. During the festival two more films will be showcased,” event organiser Lobsang Wangyal told IANS.

Wangyal has been organising the Miss Tibet contest since 2002 here amidst strong criticism from exiles, who believe the event is “un-Tibetan”.

The other films which will be screened are “Shining Spirit,” directed by Keren McDiarmid and Rita Banerjee’s “A Shawl to Die For”.

Jeff Daniels’ “The 10 Conditions of Love” is a story of the other Tibet, the Muslim Tibet - the country its people call East Turkestan, but which the Chinese call Xinjiang province.

Exiled in the US, Rebiya Kadeer is fighting for the human rights of her people, the Uyghur - China’s oppressed Muslim minority.

But Kadeer’s campaign condemns her sons to solitary confinement in a Chinese prison.

Having spent six years’ in solitary confinement herself, she understands the appalling consequences of her actions - but does not relent.

While “Shining Spirit” is a film on Tibetan culture, songs and separated families, “A Shawl to Die For” traces the ancient handicraft of ’shahtoosh’ weaving in Kashmir and traces its link to the hunting of Tibetan antelope or chiru in China to extract the fibre.

Dharamsala is the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

After India allowed the Dalai Lama to settle here in 1959, the town became an attraction for westerners in search of Tibetan culture and spiritual sustenance.

A total of 140,000 Tibetans now live in exile, over 100,000 of them in different parts of India.