Coming to NYC’s Maysles Cinema for a week run starting today, August 15: SUMMER PASTURE
Lynn True and Nelson Walker’s intimate observational portrait of a Tibetan family made its world premiere at Full Frame last year, where it garnered a special mention from the jury. It’s gone on to play at festivals around the world, and was nominated for both a Gotham and Independent Spirit award.
Locho and Yama are a young nomad couple in the Kham region of Tibet in China’s Sichuan province. Together with their baby daughter and with other members of their family nearby, they’ve come to the grasslands to tend to their yaks and make cheese and butter during the summer to last them through the upcoming winter. Even as they follow the traditional ways, the couple confess their desires that their daughter become literate, which may lead them to abandon their nomadic ways to facilitate her education. Locho speculates on the encroachment of modernization, which he believes will radically transform their summer pastures with buildings and roads, perhaps hastening a change to their way of life. Locho and Yama are fantastic documentary subjects – surprisingly open and expressive, they reveal intimate details about their relationship and seem perfectly at ease in front of the camera as they tend to their chores. The film is expertly lensed, capturing the beauty of their pasture lands, and providing the audience with a real sense of what the family may have to sacrifice in order to survive in the modern world.
what (not) to doc 