Seven Years in Tibet (1997 film)

In 1939, Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer leaves behind his pregnant wife to join Peter Aufschnaiter in a team attempting to summit Nanga Parbat in British-ruled India (now part of Pakistan). When World War II begins in 1939, they are arrested by the British authorities for being enemy aliens.

They are imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Dehradun in the Himalayan foothills, in the present-day Indian state of Uttarakhand. Harrer's wife, Ingrid, who has given birth to a son he has not seen, sends him divorce papers from Austria, by then annexed by Nazi Germany.

In 1944, Harrer and Aufschnaiter escape the prison and cross into Tibet. After being initially rejected by the isolated nation, they manage to travel in disguise to the Tibetan capital city of Lhasa. There, they become the house guests of Tibetan diplomat Kungo Tsarong. The Tibetan senior official Ngawang Jigme also extends friendship to the two foreigners with gifts of custom-made Western suits.

Aufschnaiter falls in love with the tailor, Pema Lhaki, and marries her. Harrer opts to remain single, both to focus on his new job of surveying the land and to avoid experiencing another failed relationship.

In 1945, Harrer plans to return to Austria upon hearing of the war's end; but his son Rolf sends him a cold letter in which he says that he is not his father. This stops him from leaving Tibet. Soon afterwards, Harrer is invited to the Potala Palace and becomes the 14th Dalai Lama's tutor in world geography, science, and Western culture. They end up becoming friends.

Meanwhile, political relations with the new Communist government of China sour as they make plans to take control of Tibet in replacement of the former central government, now defeated and retreated to the Taiwan island. Ngawang Jigme leads the Tibetan army at the border town of Chamdo to halt the advancing People's Liberation Army. However, he ends up surrendering and blows up the Tibetan ammunition dump after the one-sided Battle of Chamdo.

During the treaty signing, Kungo Tsarong tells Harrer that if Jigme had not destroyed the weapons supply, the Tibetan guerrillas could have held the mountain passes for months or even years; long enough to appeal to other nations for help. He also states that, for Tibetans, capitulation is like a death sentence.

As the Chinese occupy Tibet, Harrer condemns Ngawang Jigme for betraying his country, declaring their friendship over. Out of disgust and contempt, he further humiliates the senior official by returning the jacket that Ngawang Jigme gave him as a present, a grave insult in Tibetan culture; as well as by throwing him onto the ground before storming off.

Harrer tries to convince the Dalai Lama to flee, but he refuses; not wanting to abandon his people in spite of the danger. However, he encourages Harrer to return to Austria and be a father to his son. After the enthronement ceremony, in which the Dalai Lama is formally enthroned as the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, Harrer bids his friends farwell and returns to Austria in 1951.

Harrer's son, Rolf, bitterly refuses to meet him at first; but Harrer leaves a music box that the Dalai Lama gave him and this piques the boy's interest. Years later, Harrer and Rolf (now a teenager) are seen mountain-climbing together, suggesting that they have mended their relationship.

After the Chinese pressured the Indian government to threaten to cut electricity to the set and refuse to allow the film to set up a banking account, production shifted from Ladakh to Argentina.[5] After the film was released, the director confirmed that two crews secretly shot about 20 minutes of footage for the movie in Tibet. Other footage was shot in Nepal, Austria and Canada.[6]

Monks passing under the Pargo Kaling chorten, or "Western Gate", in Lhasa near the Potala during Monlam Festival in 1938 Tibet. This structure was destroyed in 1967 and rebuilt in 1995. See the image in the original movie poster above.

The film has a number of significant differences from the book. At the beginning of the film, Harrer, who notably climbed the north face of the Eiger in 1938, is hailed as a "German hero", and replies: "Thank you, but I'm Austrian." To have said that in 1939 would have been extremely bold, since Austria had been part of Greater Germany since the Anschluss of April 1938.[7] In the book, Harrer says nothing about any such remark. Additionally, during the scene at the train station, Harrer appears hostile to the Nazi Party, taking the Nazi flag with reluctance. The real-life Heinrich Harrer was in fact a Nazi Schutzstaffel NCO, and stated in his 1938 book that as a member of the German Alpine Association: "We climbed up the North Face of Eiger over the summit and up to our führer."[8][9]

The film makes Harrer's son a key theme, but in the book, Harrer does not mention his wife or son. He had in fact been married and divorced, as the film shows, but his ex-wife's new husband was killed during the war and Harrer's son was raised by his ex-wife's mother.[10] In his autobiography, Harrer gives details of his contact with his son, but nothing to support what the film shows. In the book, Harrer says there was little to tie him to his home as one of the reasons for staying in Tibet and not returning to Europe.[11]

The pre-invasion visit of Chinese Communist negotiators to Lhasa, arriving at an airfield constructed by Tibetans, and their departure for China after a brief conference with their Tibetan counterparts—including the desecration of the sand mandala as well as the "religion is poison" remark as depicted in the film, do not occur in the book or in any of the numerous histories that have been written about the matter. China's destruction of several thousand Tibetan temples and monasteries and Tibetan Buddhist texts occurred during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76).

There was no air link until Lhasa Gonggar Airport was constructed in 1956—when the Dalai Lama visited Beijing in 1954, he used the still-incomplete road system.[12]

The whole sequence of negotiations and the installation of the Dalai Lama as ruler are out of sequence. Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama was enthroned as the temporal leader of Tibet on 17 November 1950. After the Chinese crossed the Jinsha River and defeated the Tibetan army in October 1950, a Tibetan delegation was sent to Beijing and agreed on the Seventeen Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.[13] Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama left Lhasa and took refuge on the border with India and Sikkim. The Dalai Lama disliked the agreement. He returned to Lhasa, and for several years tried to work within its terms.[11]

Seven Years in Tibet premiered on September 13, 1997, at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival before a commercial release on October 8, 1997, in the United States and Canada where it opened in 3 theaters, grossing $46,130 in its first two days.[14] The film was distributed to 2,100 more theaters for the weekend where it grossed $10,020,378.[4] After its run, the film grossed $37,957,682 domestically and $93,500,000 overseas with an overall box office gross of $131,457,682.[4]

• Chinese censorship abroad
• Film censorship in China
• Kundun, another 1997 film depicting the Dalai Lama during his youth.
• List of TV and films critical of the Chinese Communist Party
• 1938–39 German expedition to Tibet, an actual state-sponsored expedition into Tibet by the Nazi Party to which Heinrich Harrer was an SS Oberscharführer.

• Seven Years in Tibet at IMDb
• Seven Years in Tibet at Box Office Mojo
• Seven Years in Tibet at Rotten Tomatoes
• Seven Years in Tibet at Metacritic
• The Wild Things of God: Seven Years in Tibet
• Seven Years in Tibet, credits for this film entered into the Cannes Film Festival in 1956