| Overview: | "Red River Valley" is more sincere, poignant and strongly emotive than Holly films "Seven Years in Tibet", "Kundun", or "Red Corner". "Red River Valley" is based on the book by British author Peter Fleming, "Bayonets to Lhasa", the last full account of the British Invastion of Tibet in 1904.
In the beginning of the century, a country Han girl is being sacrificed to a river god. Rescued first by her brother and then in a twist of fate by an old Tibetan woman, the girl begins her new life taking the name of Snow Dawa, and slowly falls in love with Gesong, the Tibetan woman's son. The young couple later save two British men buried in an avalanche. These two men have very different views about the future of Tibet. One finds the kindness, hospitality, and purity in nature of Tibetans overwhelming. The other is intent upon bringing civilization to Tibet by "liberating" the Tibetan people.
"Red River Valley", shot against the epic scale of the beautiful Tibetan landscape, provokes thoughts about the similarities of different cultures on opposite sides of the Earth, and why liberation and civilization begin with massacre. This motion picture, deftly directed by Feng Xiaoning, reflects the magnificent simplicity of the Tibetan land and people. The characters in "Red River Valley" carry such weight, they say more than a starlit cast of hundreds ever could.
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