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Documentary Film Presentation with Director, NPR's Jocelyn Ford: <i>Nowhere to Call Home</i>

Thursday, April 23, 2015
12:00 AM
Forum Hall, Palmer Commons, 100 Washtenaw Avenue

A documentary film by Jocelyn Ford. 
The event is FREE and Open to the Public!

Film screening followed by Q&A with the director.

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 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." The New York Times

SYNOPSIS:  Widowed at 28, Tibetan farmer Zanta defies her tyrannical father-in-law and after her husband's death refuses to marry the family's only surviving son. When Zanta's in-laws won't let her seven-year-old go to school, she flees her village and heads to Beijing where she becomes a street vendor. Destitute and embattled by discrimination, Zanta inveigles a foreign customer into helping pay her boy's school fees. On a New Year's trip back to her village, Zanta's in-laws take her son hostage, drawing the unwitting American into the violent family feud.  The two women forge a partnership to try to out-maneuver the in-laws, who according to tradition get the final say on their grandson.

Director: 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. 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.

Speaker: