Anchorage International Film Festival 2010

Summer Pasture is a feature-length documentary about a nomadic couple living with their infant daughter in the high grasslands of eastern Tibet. Filmed just months before the unrest of 2008, the film offers unique access to a highly insular community and a sensitive portrait of a young family at a time of great transition. Locho and his wife Yama live in Dzachukha, eastern Tibet -- nicknamed '5-most' by the Chinese for being the highest, coldest, poorest, largest, and most remote county in Sichuan Province, China. They depend on their herd of yaks for survival, just as their ancestors have for generations. In recent years however, Dzachukha has undergone rapid development, which poses an escalating threat to nomadic life. Summer Pasture evolves as an intimate exploration of Locho and Yama's personalities, relationship, and the complicated web of circumstances that surrounds them. Over its course we witness their travails with illness, infidelity, and the dissolution of their community. In the face of mounting challenges, Locho and Yama gradually reveal the personal sacrifice they will make to ensure their daughter's future. Summer Pasture is a unique alternative to the vast majority of films about Tibet, which are often shot in Diaspora communities in India and Nepal, and portray romanticized or overtly politicized views of Tibetan culture. Through it's subtle observation of Locho and Yama's character, Summer Pasture provides a deeply personal account of what it means to be a nomad in a swiftly modernizing world, and a universal story of family survival.