MB Civic

A film about Tibet is honored in London.
Radio Free Asia
November 18, 2008

WASHINGTON — A television documentary
filmed secretly in Tibet has been honored
in a competition recognizing the work of
freelance cameramen and camerawomen
who gather news in “regions where it is
difficult to operate.”

The competition, the Rory Peck Awards, is
sponsored by the Rory Peck Trust, an
independent London-based charity set up
in 1995 to provide help to freelance
newsgatherers and relatives of those killed,
injured, or persecuted in the course of
their work.

The Impact award, the category in which
the film “Undercover in Tibet” was a
competitor, is given “for freelance footage
which raises humanitarian issues and has
had an impact internationally or
contributed to a change in perception or
policy.”

The documentary was one of the top three
selected for consideration at the annual
event, held on Nov. 13 at the British Film
Institute in London.

“Undercover in Tibet,” produced by
cameraman Jezza Neumann and
interviewer Tash Despa, was filmed over
three months from late April 2007. It was
first broadcast on Britain’s Channel
4 “Dispatches” program on March 31 this
year.

“Once I met Tash and learned about the
Tibetan cause, I knew how important this
film could be,” Neumann said in an
interview. “I feel this film is incredibly
valuable, as it is video documentation of
issues the Chinese are trying to say don’t
exist.”

To make their film, Neumann and Despa
traveled through Tibet by car, dodging
Chinese police and security patrols and
speaking to ordinary Tibetans.

Protecting sources

Protecting these contacts was their “main
concern,” Neumann said.

Though interviews were shot in silhouette,
he said, “voices couldn’t be disguised until
we returned home, so any footage needed
to be hidden on a secret partition of a hard
drive, and the tapes destroyed at the
earliest opportunity.” “I also smuggled in a
secret camera which I then had to re-wire
and assemble once inside Tibet.”

“At all times, we were in danger of arrest
given the equipment we were carrying,”
Neumann said. “However, this increased at
times. For example, one interviewee got
wind of spies in the area we were due to
meet in, so we changed the rendezvous at
the last minute.”

Each meeting was treated as a “military
operation” and would take several days to
plan, he added.

Often, the men and women that Neumann
and Despa spoke with were victims of
abuse by Chinese officials and police.

One was a woman coerced into a painful
sterilization without anesthetic for having
a child “above quota.” Another was a
former prisoner who had been tortured for
posting leaflets calling for Tibetan
independence. Others were nomads
deprived of their livestock, livelihood, and
land.

“Nothing is better than the grassland,” a
nomad woman tells the filmmakers at one
point while standing in the road of a
desolate forced-resettlement town.

Painful lives

Another nomad, interviewed inside his
bleak concrete apartment, describes high
rates of alcoholism and depression among
the town’s 300 families.

“We live in terror,” he says.

At another point in the film, the former
prisoner, who had been immersed in water
by his jailers and subjected to electric
shock, breaks down part-way through his
interview. “I’m less than half the man I was
before the Chinese tortured me,” he says.

Tash Despa, a former Tibetan refugee and
now a British citizen, conducted the
interviews in his native language. He said
that he had been asked by a friend on
behalf of the British production company
True Vision if he would go back into the
region to help make the documentary.

“This was a really good chance to show the
world what happened in Tibet, to bring the
true story out of Tibet,” Despa said.  “So I
said, ‘Let’s do it!'”

Despa said that he and Neumann flew first
into Hong Kong, where they received a
visa, and then flew on into Tibet.

“We went all over Tibet: Lhasa, Amdo,” said
Despa, who fled Tibet’s northeastern Amdo
region himself in 1996.  “We couldn’t go to
Kham, because we couldn’t find any
contacts to meet with.”

Despa said he hopes that audiences
viewing the film will “put pressure on their
governments to help Tibet.”

The annual Rory Peck Awards provide a
platform for filmmakers to “get their
stories out, and to get their point of view
out,” said Tina Carr, director of the London-
based Rory Peck Trust.

“Lots of people get to see all this, and we
get a lot of inquiries. And very often,
broadcasters who didn’t know about these
films see them and want to show them.”

“I’m absolutely certain [this] will happen
with Jezza’s piece,” she said.

Reported in Washington by Richard Finney.
Edited and produced for the Web by Sarah
Jackson-Han.