University hosts UK film premiere
09 Jan 2015
Free screening of powerful story from Tibet
The University is hosting the UK premiere of Nowhere To Call Home, the powerful story of Zanta, a Tibetan woman who moves to Beijing against the wishes of her in-laws so that her young son can get an education.
The film, brought to the University by the Centre for Chinese Studies and the British Inter-university China Centre, will be screened on Tuesday, 3 February and followed by a Q&A with the film's director.
It is free but booking is essential.
Nowhere To Call Home "breaks down the sometimes romantic Shangri-La view that Westerners have of Tibet ... and offers a shocking portrait of the outright racism ... Tibetans face in Chinese parts of the country," according to the New York Times.
In August the documentary premiered in the US at MoMA and in China as the inaugural film at the opening of the Center for Documentary Studies in Beijing. It has been garnering an extraordinary track record of acclaim from both Tibetans and Han Chinese in the PRC, with a leading anthropologist describing the film as "very important for inspiring our imagination on modern China's transformation."
Widowed at 28, Tibetan farmer Zanta defies her tyrannical father-in-law and after her husband's death refuses to marry the family's only surviving son. When Zanta's in-laws won't let her seven-year-old go to school, she flees her village and heads to Beijing where she becomes a street vendor. Destitute and embattled by discrimination, Zanta inveigles a foreign customer into helping pay her boy's school fees. On a New Year's trip back to her village, Zanta's in-laws take her son hostage, drawing the unwitting American into the violent family feud. The two women forge a partnership to try to out-manoeuvre the in-laws, who according to tradition get the final say on their grandson.
This is a free but ticketed event. To book, visit: