The New Dominion

The title may sound like the beginning of a contrived bar joke, but what I’m actually referring to is (what at least appears to be) an excellent documentary about Xinjiang called “On a Tightrope.” Take a look at the interesting trailer at the documentary’s official website. One exciting thing about “On a Tightrope” is that it appears to be the only professional quality film on Xinjiang that doesn’t approach the topic from a travelogue, Silk Road angle that I’ve found. Another exciting thing about it is that it seems to approach its main subject, a tightrope walking school for Uyghur youths, as a lens through which we can learn much about the Uyghur situation in general, rather than treating it as a cute minority wenhua fengsu to be gawked at. As the trailer opens we see interspersed clips of young Uyghur boys and girls balancing themselves precariously on tightropes while hearing a Uyghur child singing a prayer and an unseen Han commentator admiring the 2000 year history of darwaz - the Uyghur word for the tightrope walking tradition. Heavy stuff. Next, we learn that there’s a little more to the tightrope walking school as ranks of young orphans proclaim, in Uyghur, their loyalty to communism and their eternal aversion to nationalist separatism and religious extremism, hands clenched into fists held aloft alongside their heads. I’m loving these filmmakers - for breaking away from the typical “Silk Road exotica” or “lesser Tibet” mold Xinjiang is always being thrown into, and also for somehow successfully getting the paperwork and permissions to undertake such a documentary, which must have been a monumental task in and of itself. One problem: I don’t speak Norwegian. ARGH.

So the more I read about this, the more I started wondering how a Xinjiang documentary which debuted March of last year and has won awards at several film festivals completely slipped past my radar, and the answer came pretty loud and clear before long - this is a Norwegian language project, from the film’s subtitles down to the distribution websites. I found two reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, one from a Minnesota site which for a brief moment offered me hope that the film has an English language version. But then I saw the name of the reviewer: Erik Lundegaard. Coincidence? Probably not. The documentary’s format seems to be Norwegian subtitles for spoken Mandarin and Uyghur, which means we at The New Dominion can probably figure out a majority of the spoken content, but I still have to figure out a Norwegian webpage to get around to purchasing the full film. Until then - calling all Norwegian speaking readers of our site! You’re needed!