The Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio has followed up its earlier documentary on Tibet, A Million Serfs Stand Up, with Joyous Tibet, a first-hand record of the way the Tibetan people carried through the great democratic reform movement after the suppression of the rebellion of their erstwhile feudal rulers. For its artistry in presenting a story of great historical significance this new and deeply moving film received the first main prize at the Third International Newsreel and Documentary Film Week sponsored by the German Democratic Republic in Leipzig in November.

Joyous Tibet recapitulates enough of the past to make the reality of the present understandable. Its shattering exposure of the hellish life of the Tibetan serfs in the past makes doubly meaningful the smiles and happiness of these former serfs today and the spirit in which they pressed through with the reforms that ended Tibetan serfdom. Here we see what is meant indeed by the Communist Party's policy on nationalities and by democratic reform.

The camera takes us to Chhiedtsomo, a 66-year-old slave woman who before the quelling of the rebellion lived all her life in a cowshed. Bent with age and a life of appalling hardship and misery, she refuses to miss the chance of telling the cadres who come to interview her about how her family has lived for five generations as slaves in cowsheds.

We are introduced to Gadan, who has just returned from his hideout deep in the mountains. Ten years ago when he was unable to pay rent to the serfowner he was forced to flee with his family to the mountains. Had he not escaped, he tells the interviewers, his head would have been cut off long ago for this was the punishment the serfowner threatened to give him and there were many examples to prove that he meant it.

In damning contrast to the shocking conditions meted out to the former serfs, the film takes us inside the luxurious residences of the Tibetan nobles, high-ranking officials and ecclesiastics. Here are hoards of gold, silver and other precious things. A huge pile of money and objects "deposited on lease" stands as a monumental indictment of the rapacity of the serfowners.

These accusatory sequences exposing crimes of serfdom, lead to a record of scenes of the victory of the liberation struggle of the former serfs. We see them burning piles of mortgage deeds and written acknowledgements of loans at usurious rates; homeless serfs are moving into their new homes; Han cadres do their utmost to help the Tibetan people in their struggle for liberation. They share with Tibetans the same food and lodgings; together they till the land the serfs can now call their own. For the first time the Tibetan peasants set up their own organization--the peasants' association, and raise the slogan "All rights belong to the peasants' association!"

Then come the joyous scenes in which the former serfs celebrate their emancipation. We see them drinking qingke wine in the fields, bringing their new farm tools and draught animals to their new homes and looking with gratitude at the title deeds to their land given them in the land reform.

The final sequences show the flurry of activities taking place in Tibet. Mutual-aid teams are being organized; newly established trade groups are bringing in supplies of daily necessities that the masses can now afford; new health centres are springing up in the mountain towns and villages and everywhere children and adults are busy at their studies studying for an even finer tomorrow.

(This article appears on page 50, No. 49, 1960)