Profiling Tibetan diasporic cinema from a gender perspective.

This article preliminarily discusses Tibetan films made in exile, which challenge the popular idea of Tibet as a holy (men’s) land, mostly populated by monks, where women are marginal charac- ters, often victimized and with little agency. If cinema by Tibetan filmmakers inside Tibet has been so far extremely parsimonious in its display of female characters on screen, Tibetan films made in exile have often casted Tibetan women in important roles, together with other male counterparts, or even in leading roles. While there is a long way to go before we could speak of a Tibetan women cinema or a feminist cinema by Tibetan women, the efforts at highlighting not simply the plights faced by Tibetan women in exile but also their thoughts and actions as desiring subjects have given rise to an interesting cinema, which slowly but steadily is carving a niche for addressing issues and concerns that go beyond the diasporic condition of being a Tibetan refugee. Addressing the issue of visual representation of Tibetan women from a gender perspective, this article contributes to shed some light on the ways Tibetan filmmakers are trying to create a political space for women to become agents of their future and to reclaim a voice beyond the stereotypes and the mystifications which engulf the idea of Tibet.