致亞歷珊卓 (TO ALEXANDRA)
China, Canada, USA / 2025 / Experimental, Non-Fiction / 72min
Cui Yi, Tserang Ghon, in collaboration with Jamyang Tashi, Lobsang Nyima,
Bey Choesam, Sha Qing and Gobo Tashi
SYNOPSIS:
Two travelogues intertwined.
A collage.
A correspondence.
Through text, the journey of the researcher-writer Alexandra David-Néel across the Himalayas a century ago is narrated via her letters home.
In audiovisual spaces, the filmmaker’s experiences in eastern Tibet are contemplated through her own lenses and those of the native Tibetan people.
Artist Statement:
“Who was it written to? Who is it written to? Who will it be written to?”
“Can I write back? To whom would I be addressing? If the consciousness behind the letters exists, can we have a dialogue?”
These questions kept recurring to me as I read the letters by Alexandra David-Néel, a woman often celebrated as a pioneering European explorer of the Himalayas. Yet beyond her popular portrayal, the Alexandra I encountered in her writings was an earnest scholar, tireless in her quest for truths. Her travels through the Himalayas were never end goals, but paths naturally carved by her inquiries.
For ten years, I returned again and again to Eastern Tibet, to share with the local community the art of capturing the world through a camera. Yet people there have offered me far more than I gave them, not only through our interactions, but also through their lenses. Through their lenses, I learned how they perceive human and non-human worlds, how they talk to nature, how they dance through space, and how they face life and death. The audiovisual landscape created by the native filmmakers became integral to my own journey in the Himalayas.
More than a century stands between Alexandra’s journeys and mine. I am too humbled to compare my personal encounters to her legendary life. However, as I reflect on my time living and working in Eastern Tibet, Alexandra’s questions, conundrums, pains, joys, and moments of enlightenment … feel intimately close, as if we were on a shared path. Yes, she was writing to her loved one. But don’t these words, having endured a century, also speak to me—and to many others—here in this moment of history?
Like Alexandra, I question myself, as an outsider in the land of snows.
Like Alexandra, I grapple with my own role in a colonial history behind and in front of me.
Like Alexandra, I suffer the same sufferings, standing between the East and the West, solitude and relationship, the spiritual and the secular life …
Like Alexandra, Like Alexandra, I search for a way forward, even as history is shattered by plagues, wars, human ferocity, and greed.
Like Alexandra, my fragile ‘self’ has been soothed yet profoundly challenged by encounters on the Tibetan plateau.
We write through different media. We write to one another.
Would Alexandra find joy in hearing from us — a fellow traveler, and the Tibetan people she cherished?