Summer Pasture

The University of Colorado Boulder will screen Summer Pasture, a feature-length documentary about a young nomadic couple living with their infant daughter in the high grasslands of eastern Tibet. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Nelson Walker.

A documentary film by Lynn True, Nelson Walker & Tsering Perlo, followed by Q&A by Nelson Walker

7:00 - 9:00p.m.

Visual Arts Complex (VAC) 1B20

Summer Pasture is a feature-length documentary about a young nomadic couple living with their infant daughter in the high grasslands of eastern Tibet. Filmed during the summer of 2007 with rare access to an area seldom visited by outsiders, Summer Pasture offers an unprecedented window into a highly insular community and a sensitive portrait of a family at a time of great transition. Locho and his wife Yama live in Dzachukha, eastern Tibet - nicknamed "5-most" by the Chinese for being the highest, coldest, poorest, largest, and most remote area in the Sichuan Province, China. They depend on their herd of yaks for survival, just as their ancestors have for generations. In recent years however, Dzachukha has undergone rapid development, which poses unprecedented challenges to nomadic life.

Summer Pasture evolves as an intimate exploration of Locho and Yama's personalities, relationship, and the complicated web of circumstances that surrounds them. Over its course we witness their travails with illness, infidelity, and the dissolution of their community. In the face of mounting obstacles, Locho and Yama gradually reveal the personal sacrifice they will make to ensure their daughter's future. Through its subtle observation of Locho and Yama's character, Summer Pasture provides a deeply personal account of what it means to be a nomad in a swiftly modernizing world, and a universal story of family survival.