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The Spirit Doesn't Come Anymore
NEPAL / 1997 / Tibetan / Color / Video / 38 min Director, Photography: Tsering Rhitar Editing: Murali Gurappa Music: Nelung Tsering Topten Cast: Pao Wang Chuk, Tsingdo (Pao’s wife), Karma (Pao’s eldest son) Producer: Sherab Lhawang, Tsering Rhitar Production Company, Source: Sri Films Pvt. Ltd. P.O. Box 3064, Kathmandu, NEPAL Phone: 977-1-47171640 Fax: 977-1-479083 E-mail: mila@wlink.com.np		Tsering Rhitar Born in Nepal in 1968 to a Sherpa father and a Tibetan mother. Studied filmmaking in Delhi, India. In 1994, he spent a year in Dharamsala, India, filming the Dalai Lama and the institutions of the Tibetan government-in-exile. His work includes Tears of Torture (1994), a 27-minute documentary about a Tibetan nun who crossed snow passes and Chinese police checkposts to escape from Tibet on foot, Breath (1995), The Marriage Proposal (1996), Shower of Virtue and Goodness (1996). The Spirit Doesn't Come Anymore is his third and most recent documentary. A new feature film is scheduled for completion in 1999.
From Nepal, the conflict between a shaman refugee from Tibet and his son, a friend of the director from his schooldays, caught in the midst of the contradictions of modern day society and traditional values. Director's Statement On a personal level, I have known Pao and his family since my childhood. My mother, being a Tibetan, lived in the same refugee camp till we moved down to Kathmandu, and I knew Karma (Pao's son) since childhood - we are of the same age. So the communication during the making of the film happened rather naturally. The film is a very personal one and on one level I would say Pao Wangchuk is a unique individual with a very unusual family vocation. Though I am not an authority to pass judgment on this art which has survived over two millenniums in Tibet yet, I think the healing works more on a psychological level than physical. Many still believe that Pao could heal them - he is easily accessible and spiritually appropriate (to the very religious people), and can communicate well with them. I have encountered, during the course of making the film, many of Pao's patients - most of them felt some kind of improvements after having been treated by him, but also many of them said that (though the pain was gone) they still found in the X-ray the stones in their kidneys and gall-bladders even after Pao took them out. I find no scientific basis for this tradition, nor I think is this Buddhist. On another plane, I take Pao Wangchuk as a metaphor for the corruption and commercialization of the Tibetan culture in exile as a result of increasing romanticization, exoticization and exploitation of it by the media. The film therefore attempts somehow to break the stereotypical (Western) notions of the people of Himalayan region as being highly spiritual, ever-smiling and ever-generous, simple folk with no complexities. In the film the healer is neither a holy man nor a generous person (nor an unworldly one, like a character from the X-File series), but a very ordinary person with all the human follies, and he is not given any special status in his social circle, in fact a lot of people hate him for his character and behavior towards his wife and children.
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