My father likes to say, “Whatever Mountainfilm’s about, it’s always about Tibet.” I don’t think he’s entirely right, but he’s certainly not wrong. As the new festival director, I thought about covering Tibet less this year—maybe just to prove him wrong. Then, of course, Tibet erupted.

Fortunately, I’d met Pico Iyer (who has been called “the finest living travel writer today”) a few years ago at Mountainfilm. Pico’s new book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. When he was a child, Pico met His Holiness. As a result, this portrait takes a long view, yet it is also a fresh and focused, insightful and intimate look at the man so many of us have admired, or even revered, from afar.

What shines through is how much this spiritual man traffics in reason and rationale. As Pico writes, “as soon as you start talking to the Dalai Lama, as I have been doing for 33 years, you notice that his favorite adjectives are ‘logical’ and ‘realistic,’ and the verbs he returns to are ‘investigate,’ ‘analyze’ and ‘explore.’” The problem, of course, is reason’s place when Tibet’s rich culture is being extinguished by the Chinese government.

After Pico’s talk, he will be joined by Losang and Tashi Rabgey, who will help us understand what is happening on the ground in Tibet. Losang is an anthropologist who specializes in contemporary Tibetan culture and gender relations, while her sister is the director of Tibetan studies at the University of Virgina. Together, they run Machik, an organization that helps with grass-roots community organization for the people of Tibet.
- David Holbrooke