Yak herder by tradition, business student now trying to preserve an ancient way of life.
When the Chinese government saw Dawa Drolma's award-winning first film, "Clay," they thought it was the work of a foreign filmmaker. This was before they visited her village in the high altitude plateau of Tibet's Dzongsar Valley, and found that the talent behind that documentary was, in her own words, just a "normal, Tibetan village girl."
Who better to tell the story of the culture of Tibet, which is governed as an autonomous region of China. It is predominately Buddhist, with an agricultural-based economy. Drolma, now a student at Bay Path College in Longmeadow, brings her audience inside her village in the film short, which was recently shown at Bay Path, giving the world a glimpse at its ancient traditions one frame at a time.
Drolma began working as a yak herder when she was about six years old. She comes from a family of artisans. Her father and brother are master sculptors who use traditional techniques to sculpt figures of the Buddha in clay. These complex techniques have been practiced by Tibetan craftspeople for centuries. It is a profession, by tradition, reserved to men.
To help Drolma pursue her own artistic vision, her English teachers loaned her cameras. She used them to begin working on a book, putting together photographs and stories from the folklore of her village. Her next step was to make a film.
"Clay" focuses on the sculpture work of her father and brother. Drolma taught herself filmmaking as she went along, from learning camera techniques to
editing video, with a trial version of Adobe "Premiere." A local non-profit organization allowed her to burn DVDs of her finished film, and with encouragement from her teachers, she submitted it to the World Crafts Council International Film Festival in 2012. It took first place.
Because she films with an insider's perspective, Drolma brings her audience into the heart of Tibetan culture. She highlights the passion for and harmony with nature in her home village, striving to visually preserve Tibetan life, art, and spirit. Through her work, she hopes to highlight the importance of not allowing such a culture to vanish.
In her current film, "White Lies," Drolma shows the relationship between the yak herders and their animals. She shows how each part of the animal has a purpose—hair spun into string, milk churned into butter, dung burned as fuel.
She also captures the way the herders see each animal as their partner. She shows herders singing to their yaks as they milk them. When one of her yaks, Chizi, looses a calf, Drolma follows the animal up the mountain to search for him. When the yak discovers her calf dead and turns to her keeper for comfort, the filmmaker reaches for her from behind the camera to offer it. The empathy between them comes alive.
Drolma, whose journey to the United States was the subject of a Chinese television documentary, is a member of the class of 2017 at Bay Path, where she is majoring in business. She hopes to use her degree as another way to promote Tibetan craftsmanship and culture.