Published by: World Tibet Network News Wednesday - October 8, 1997

Tibet activists hope Hollywood film will boost cause

WASHINGTON, Oct 8 (AFP) - Activists pressing China to keep hands off Tibet hope the new film "Seven Years in Tibet" -- opening Wednesday and starring Hollywood heartthrob Brad Pitt -- will help boost their cause.

"We want this film to do for Tibet what 'Beyond Rangoon' did for Burma," said Bhuchung Tsering, Washington-based spokesman for the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT).

Critics of Burma's military government say that film, a fictitious account of a US tourist trapped in Burma during a real-life 1988 crackdown, has fuelled a growing sanctions movement at the grassroots level.

ICT plans to distribute 150,000 Tibet "action kits" at cinemas in New York and Los Angeles, where the film opens first, telling moveigoers how they can "join in the struggle to end Chinese oppression in Tibet."

The 70-million-dollar film, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, chronicles the life of an Austrian mountaineer who wound up tutoring the Dalai Lama during the 1940s and witnessing China's annexation of Tibet.

New revelations that the mountaineer, Heinrich Harrer, voluntarily joined the Nazis in 1933 and served in Hitler's elite SS brigade from 1938 have given an unexpected jolt of negative publicity to the film.

They also reportedly drew Annaud to make some changes to "Seven Years in Tibet" after shooting the film to reflect the new information about the main character.

Harrer, now 85 and living in his native Austria, has said publicly that his Nazi service was an "aberration" and that his personal philosphy, shaped by his experience in Tibet, "leads me to condemn as strongly as possible the horrible crimes of the Nazi era."

Tibet's exiled Buddhist spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled his Himalayan homeland in 1959 following its occupation by China. Beijing is accused of widespread human rights abuses there.