Kekexili
Director: Chuan Lu
Writers: Chuan Lu (writer)
Release Date: 1 October 2004 (China)
Outline: A moving true story about volunteers protecting antelope against poachers in the severe mountains of Tibet.
Lu Chuan's account of pauperized characters involved in a plexus of emotional transference and punishments of violent crime interpretively reenacted from a true story transpired in bucolic Tibet is an engagingly foreboding and unsettling melodrama of latter day isolationism. The Tibetan Mountain Patrol, a self-sponsored outcast regimen established to eliminate illegal slaughtering of endangered Tibetan Antelopes by impoverished local and out-of-province peasants, intimately engages with a half-Tibetan journalist from Beijing in a desolate depiction of human nature in the outskirts of Kekexili during a last resort campaign of portent and trial.
When Beijing journalist Ga Yu arrives at the mystical camp of the Kekexili Mountain Patrol, he witnesses a Tibetan funeral and a village in mourning. Ga Yu is determined to uncover the real story behind the mysterious disappearance of patrol volunteers, the killing of rare Tibetan antelopes and the rumor that the Mountain Patrol collaborates with the poachers. Ga Yu joins a patrol headed out into 40,000 square kilometers of wilderness. The illegal hunters are like phantoms in the uninhabited land, hiding in caves, tracking the patrol members like sinister shadows, waiting for the right moment to launch their deadly attack -- the patrolmen have become the hunted. Despite the severe environment, the patrol led by Ri Tai risk their lives in the fight against the callous poachers. At first an observer, distanced by the lens of his camera, Ga Yu slowly becomes personally involved in the struggle. He gradually becomes aware that this is not just a regular patrol but a journey about life. To the patrol members, Kekexili is their homeland as well as it is the habitat of the antelopes. In the transmigration of life, they will always be on guard for the homeland. Through the eyes of Ri Tai and the other patrolmen, Ga Yu witnesses the real beauty of their lives: their faith.
