INTERVIEW: ‘Sweet Requiem’ offers timely reflection on struggles of refugee community
Photo: Tenzin Dolker stars in Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s new film, The Sweet Requiem. Photo courtesy of Pablo Bartholomew / Provided by official site with permission.
The Sweet Requiem is the new film from directors Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam about a young Tibetan woman living in exile in India. She must deal with the daily realities of life in Delhi and also reconcile past traumatic events that continue to haunt her memories. She is a person with one foot in the present, struggling to survive as a refugee, and one foot in the past, trying to understand what happened to her family in their hellish journey across the Himalayas.
Sarin and Sonam’s film played the Toronto Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival and others. The drama is now set to open Friday, July 12 at the IFC Center in New York City, with more cities in the United States to follow.
“I’m of Tibetan origin, a Tibetan exile living in India, and Ritu and me have been very closely connected with the Tibetan community in exile,” Sonam said in a recent Skype interview. “We’ve also done a lot of previous work on Tibetan subjects.”
The specific inspiration for The Sweet Requiem came to the directors after they heard about a traumatic incident involving refugees on a mountain pass between Nepal and Tibet. The struggle and tragedy of this story compelled them to look more into the difficulties faced by those who have taken to the Himalayas to start a new life in India.
“This was the first time we actually had an idea of what it was like for these refugees to be crossing the high Himalayas and the kind of dangers they faced,” Sonam said. “We knew many of these refugees who had come to India from the late 1990s to the 2000s.”
Sarin said the film was extremely difficult to shoot, given the different climates and terrains they had to endure in India.
“The film was shot in Ladakh,” she said. “And it was really a very difficult shoot because not only was it a low-budget production, and we were working with nonprofessional actors, but we had to deal with really problematic climate situations. We had extreme temperatures to deal with. In Ladakh, we were shooting over 15,000 feet, and I don’t know how cold it was. It was like below -10 Centigrade [14 degrees Fahrenheit].”
She added later: “It was really cold, and because of budgetary constraints, we didn’t have the kind of mountaineering gear that a shoot like this in the West would normally have.”
The team also shot in Delhi for the modern-day scenes, and the temperatures in that city rose to 45 degrees Centigrade, or 113 degrees Fahrenheit. “So we had extreme temperature, but we had a very good cast and crew, who was completely supportive of the project,” Sarin said. “We came through very well.”
The husband-wife filmmaking team had several goals in mind when filming The Sweet Requiem, and those goals continue now with the movie’s international distribution. For starters, Sonam said he recognizes that there are few Tibetan filmmakers and not much of a back catalog of films on this subject matter.
“So I think we felt it was important for us to reflect on our own experiences, our own stories and to tell them on film,” he said. “So that was one goal. The second was really because Tibet in the last decade or so has slowly slipped out of international awareness. There are a number of reasons why that’s happened, but Tibet is no longer the cause that used to fire the imagination of the international community.”
That means The Sweet Requiem serves as a reminder of the situation that is ongoing in China, Tibet and India. Sonam and Sarin are trying to shed light on a “forgotten refugee crisis.”
“And, of course, we are very concerned with issues of justice, and we felt it was important to tell the stories of refugees everywhere,” Sarin said. “For us, the whole story of the child and the parents and that separation was very important, and also the story of finally having compassion and having to let go of the past. I think those themes were very important to us as well as filmmakers.”
The Sweet Requiem features nonprofessional actors, including Tenzin Dolker in her acting debut as the central character of Dolkar. Finding the actor was one of the first objectives of the filmmaking team. They conducted an extensive online audition process, and Dolker’s talents quickly came on to their radar.
“We had known her over the years, so we were kind of aware she existed,” Sarin said. “But we were very happy she had applied, and we did a very short intensive workshop with someone who deals with actors, just one-to-one for a few weeks, and after that a lot of it was just with a bit of guidance. She was quite naturally good.”
Sonam added: “Dolker, in her real life, is very outgoing. She’s a dancer. She does yoga, so I think she was kind of used to working with her body. So it didn’t take her that long to understand how to act, and I guess not just Dolker, but all the other actors in the film, who are pretty much all nonprofessionals, I think it helped that the story was so close to their own experience that either they had themselves walked across the mountains as kids or they knew somebody who had. So it was a very immediate story, and I think that really helped in getting them into the roles.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Sweet Requiem, directed by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, opens Friday, July 12 at the IFC Center in New York City. The directors will be in person at a number of screenings for moderated discussions. Click here for more information and tickets.
