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Derek ELLEY is Chief Film Critic of "Film Bussiness Asia."
□By DEREK
A delicately observed drama built out of everyday events in the life of a sheep herder\'s family, RIVER is a vast improvement on director Sonthar Gyal\'s first feature The Sun Beaten Path, a desert-set Tibetan/Buddhist meditation of the kind so beloved of international festivals. There\'s about the same, minimal amount of dialogue in his new film but it\'s much more naturally employed and the characters (again played by non-professionals) are more sympathetic and less schematic. A tiny film that\'s sustained by small behavioural moments, and by a warmth between the characters that is never expressed in words, RIVER gives some hope that Sonthar Gyal may develop a separate film-making personality from his longtime mentor Pema Tseden , on several of whose films he\'s worked as a cameraman or art director.
Set in the high grasslands of the director\'s native Qinghai province, China, the film sketches three seasons (spring, summer, autumn) in a sheep herder\'s family, largely through the eyes of the young daughter. Devoted to her father, bullied by local kids, but finding company with her teddy bear and an orphaned lamb she helps raise, Yangchan Lhamo is the prism through whom the audience observes the family.
On the one hand is the herder\'s wife, pregnant with another child whom Yangchan Lhamo says she doesn\'t want as a brother or sister; on the other hand is the herder himself, who conceals some deep hurt with his father, a respected lama-turned-hermit. The (kind of) resolution of their conflict is the film\'s only real drama, but it\'s movingly handled in very simple terms, more through faces than dialogue, plus small physical moments. The grandfather\'s face is hardly seen, but his presence is felt throughout the film as the herder broods over a past slight.
Guru Tsedan is okay as the herder but has little to do apart from stoically driving his motorbike across the grasslands. It\'s young Yangchan Lhamo who dominates the film, as a kid with her own private and public worlds, and who slides between obstinacy and secrecy, obedience and naughtiness, without ever becoming cute.
One of the small pleasures of River is that, though made by a Chinese Tibetan, it doesn\'t rely on the usual ethnic and religious overload: these could be any nomads, anywhere. In the same way, the clean photography by Wang Meng (The Sun Beaten Path, China Affair ) is good-looking without overdoing the natural beauty of the grasslands setting.