San Francisco International Film Festival 20 April - 04 May 2006

• Skip to Main Content
• Home
• Gallery
• Films

• Our History
• Great Moments
• Awards & Tributes

• Collective Memory
• Closeups
• Guests

 

Against an eerie moonscape of looming mountains, four tiny figures on a vast plain shovel what looks like dirty white snow into hundreds of piles, then pack it into bags and sew them up. It’s work that’s been done for centuries, by hand, slowly, carefully, with great dignity. Documentarian Ulrike Koch tracks the ritualized odyssey of nomadic Tibetan herdsmen to the dried salt lakes in the remote uncharted alpine desert that covers most of Western Tibet. The four men are hand picked for their specific skills and take on clearly defined familial roles—mother, father, keeper of the animals and novice—creating an unspoken bond designed to ensure their emotional and physical survival. They make their arduous way across a hauntingly desolate landscape, sing their songs, tell their stories and, in weeks of backbreaking work, collect their salt—the precious “white gold” that protects them against dehydration in the harsh aridity and altitude of their homeland. The film is an old-fashioned, ethnographic-style look at a culture that is now teetering on the edge of oblivion. The Chinese have already crisscrossed this once remote and inaccessible region with roads and use lorries to transport their own salt, in ironic contrast to the slow-moving animals of the Tibetans. With its solemn pacing, its verité style, the guilelessness of its subjects and the magnificence of its landscape, Saltmen of Tibet is a dream-like and entrancing experience.

Copyright © 2006 San Francisco Film Society