Canadian premiere of the film “Nowhere to Call Home” , May 20, 2015, Mayfair Theatre, 1074 Bank St, Ottawa, (poster) – English version), (poster – Chinese version)
Nowhere To Call Home tells the powerful story of Zanta, a Tibetan woman who moved to Beijing against the wishes of her in-laws so that her young son could get an education. The New York Times, in an article titled “Inspiring Dialogue, Not Dissent, in China,” wrote: “The film breaks down the sometimes romantic Shangri-La view that Westerners have of Tibet… and offers a shocking portrait of the outright racism… Tibetans face in Chinese parts of the country.”
In 2014, Nowhere To Call Home premiered in the U.S. at the Museum of Modern Art, and in China as the inaugural film at the opening of the new Center for Documentary Studies in Beijing. It has has been invited to screen for Xinhua News Agency editors, and at a half dozen educational institutions, including Peking University, Renmin University, Minzu University, and PKU high school. The film has been garnering an extraordinary track record of acclaim from both Tibetans and Han Chinese in the PRC, with a leading anthropologist describing the film as “very important for inspiring our imagination on modern China’s transformation.” Nowhere To Call Home has been translated into six languages, and was awarded a jury special mention at the Millenium Documentary Film Festival in Belgium.
Jocelyn Ford, former Beijing and Tokyo bureau chief for the U.S. public radio show Marketplace, has been based in East Asia for three decades. Her groundbreaking reporting on “comfort women” in the 1990s was a catalyst for raising awareness about World War II abuses of women by Japan’s military. During three years of filming Nowhere to Call Home, Jocelyn overcame restrictions on access to Tibetan communities to shine light on the complex choices facing Tibetan farmers living in contemporary China, and to lend new insights into the social fragility of the world’s fastest rising power.
Watch the Trailer