State Of Statelessness | Tibetan Anthology Reflects A Shared Yearning For Home

State of Statelessness (2024), the latest work from Drung Tibetan Filmmakers’ Collective, is an anthology weaving through exilic memory, longing for a lost home. Negotiations for a rooted sense of community arc through its four segments. There’s loss, resentment and nostalgia for a national home threading characters’ present reality. Being severed from kindred spaces haunts men and women across the films. Crafted by Tibetan diaspora filmmakers, the anthology is an expression of attachment. In the first Vietnam-set film, directed by Tsering Tashi Gyalthang, a father’s pining song for his homeland runs concurrent to the Mekong River’s trajectory. The shortest in the anthology, it’s undercut by the ultimate recognition of one’s fragile longings. A man recalls where he came from for his daughter. He grasps at memories. As the film unravels, chasms between historical memory and his embodied remembrances become porous.

The films are about an ache for connection and the ultimate gaps in between. Each wrestles with the idea of home, where one is born and places they move through. State of Statelessness emphasises the push and pull we experience with our roots, bringing in a mix of frustration and uncertainty. Much of our lives are governed by a particular geography, which in turn becomes emotionally invested. Conflicts burst out from staying committed to a place versus nagging thoughts about how life would be more bearable elsewhere. For characters across the films, this other place remains the mystical—an elusive home of a shared Tibetan community. Yearning for it infuses the narratives with a pained unattainability, which also clashes with unfeasibility.

In the third story, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s A Little Cloud, Sonam’s (Tenzin Phuntsok) wife, Kesang, insists on moving abroad. But he wants to remain in Dharamshala. He stresses having built a satisfying life in the town. He has his thangka paintings, she her nursing job. Would they even be able to find their bearings abroad? But an implied tragedy that has to do with their daughter hovers in the friction between the husband and wife. Kesang wants more from life—a space to explore her own passion. DP Anand Bansal uses the space of a room to suggest frays and emotional distance between a couple and two individuals. Caught in the rut of making ends meet, Kesang is joyless, bitter. But at least, she’s transparent about what she seeks and all that’s pulling at her. Sonam harps on the comforts of sticking to a long-settled home. However, he’s equally absorbed in revering expats like Jigdal (Tenor Sharlo)—his old America-based classmate who’s dropping by. The film is built around Sonam’s anxious anticipation over the classmate’s arrival. The event widens the couple’s strife. They get by modestly, yet Sonam splurges on a pricey foreign brand whisky to impress the visitor.

In State of Statelessness, characters are splintered across a vast topography, extending from India to America to Vietnam. The four directors reckon with the point of origin from perspectives of return as well as its impossibility. In the third segment, Sonam Tseten’s Bhardo, two estranged sisters are forced into intimacy on the occasion of their mother’s death. Between the two, there’s abundant hurt, humiliation, bitterness. One has held onto long-time wounds, the other seeks forgiveness. The decision to stay back and look after her sick mother hasn’t fared well for the caregiving sister. She has lost access to a life outside responsibility and the pursuit of other relationships. The rite of homecoming in the film is fraught with confrontation, guilt and grief.

Bereavement also wraps the fourth and final film, arguably the most well-formed of the lot. In Tenzin Tsetan Choklay’s At The End The Rain Stops, Tenzin (Tenzin Tseten) comes from America to his father’s house in Dharamshala on the latter’s sudden death. As the boy gets into the duties of readying the house for sale, scrounging through miscellaneous, unwanted stuff for donations, he becomes immersed in his cultural roots. Initially, he’s a bit at sea. But Norbu (Thupten Dhargay), the son of Tenzin’s childhood nanny, takes him around the place, deepening his familiarity. The bond between the two hints at strong homoerotic undertones, but the film pulls back and disappointingly side-tracks to convention by its close. It’s the only blip in an otherwise sensitive narrative, in which familiarity with identity blooms through unexpected loss. An emotional lucidity in Choklay’s telling keeps the film on coast. Gradually, revelations emerge. Both in Bhardo and At The End The Rain Stops, bidding farewell to the dead shore up repressed secrets and long-overdue encounters. The anthology has an admirable sense of restraint. All the characters are dispersed, cracked apart. Their well-sunk, quiet disconsolation limns each of the films. One only wishes it also engaged a tad more vocally with assimilation pangs and the particular bent of loneliness.

State of Statelessness will be screened at Indian Film Festival of Melbourne 2025 (Aug 14-24).