Published by: World Tibet Network News Saturday, December 20, 1997

[Xinhua is the official news agency of the PRC]

LOS ANGELES, 12/19/97 (Xinhua) -- The movie "Seven Years in Tibet" distorts historical events and is based on invented stories, a Tibetan scholar said here on Monday.

Asked to comment on the movie at a press conference, Dotar, a researcher at the China Tibetology Centre, said: "It distorts history and historical events and gives an untruthful picture of the Tibetan natural environment."

"It is really cheap stuff and full of loopholes. I'm especially irritated by the fact that it prettifies a Nazi while vilifying Tibetans," he added.

"The ignorance of the movie makers is shocking. They seem to be trying to cheat their audience."

"Tibetans are courageous people who fought a last-ditch battle, for instance, with the British invaders in 1904," quite different from the movie version which presents them as cowards, Dotar said.

In the movie, Tibet is a land of peace, away from turmoil of the world. But the truth is, Dotar said, Tibet in the 1940s was still a land of serfdom, where feudal lords who constituted only 5 per cent of the population possessed 95 per cent of the means of production.

"They (serfs) were even more miserable than the black slaves in the United States before the civil war. So Tibet was not peaceful at all because the struggles between the slaves and their lords were very fierce," he said.

He also gave some other examples from the movie which do not comply with the facts.

The movie, which is based on the leading character's memoirs, tells a story of a Nazi Austrian mountaineer who, in the autumn of 1939, escaped from a British prisoner-of-war camp in India and made his way eventually to Lhasa, in Tibet. He later made friends with the young Dalai Lama and became his English tutor. He stayed there for seven years.