By director Paul Wagner and line producer Tom Grant

Many people, upon hearing how we filmed Windhorse, say that the story of the filming is as amazing as the fictional story. For those of us in the cast and crew of Windhorse, it truly was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many reasons, but especially because we filmed Windhorse "illegally" inside Tibet and in Nepal.

For over fifty years, Tibet has been under the tight control of the Chinese communist government, and especially the secret police known as the PSB, or Public Security Bureau. In 1950, Chinese forces invaded Tibet, and in 1959, His Holiness the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India.

Since that time, any activities that support or encourage Tibetan freedom or that acknowledge the temporal and spiritual leadership of the Dalai Lama are strictly forbidden. As the story in the film makes clear, even images of the Dalai Lama, which would otherwise be displayed in every Tibetan home, are banned in Tibet.

In the fall of 1993, a story in the New York Times caught my attention. A young American woman had been arrested by the Chinese police for taking photos of a pro-Tibetan demonstration in Lhasa, the capitol of Tibet. I was interested in the story because I had learned a bit about Tibet and their struggle for freedom from my neice, Julia Elliott, who was a student of Tibetan culture and language living in Kathmandu in Nepal, the Himalayan nation that borders Tibet. Within a few hours of reading the article, I learned that the young woman was, in fact, Julia.

After taking Julia's passport, camera and film of the demonstration, the Chinese PSB released her. But the incident became the spark that ignited Windhorse.

The following summer, Julia introduced me to her Tibetan friend Thupten Tsering. Thupten had grown up in the sizeable community of Tibetan refugees living in Kathmandu. Over the years of Chinese repression, more than 100,000 Tibetans had left Tibet and settled in Nepal, India and several countries in the West, including the United States. Although living in exile from their beloved nation, these communities are thriving and producing second and now even third generations who are able to practice their Buddhist faith and live as free Tibetans.

Thupten had for some time been talking to and videotaping conversations with people who had recently come out of Tibet. He was especially interested in the plight of Tibetans, especially young people like himself, who faced depressing prospects in a country stripped of its culture and under economic and military domination.

Thupten, Julia and Paul agreed to collaborate on the creation of a feature film that would use a fictional script to dramatize the lives of young Tibetans, but would be based on the actual situation inside Tibet. From the very conception of the idea, it was clear that we would have to film inside Tibet and in Nepal under conditions of secrecy.

Certainly, the PSB and Chinese communist authorities would absolutely not permit us to shoot the film in Tibet. But we also realized that filming openly would be impossible in Nepal, where the government, nervous about their perilously close proximity to China, significantly represses the political activities of the Tibetan refugees living in their midst.

In the fall of 1996, with a script in hand that pointedly criticized the Chinese government for its Tibetan policies, we began production. Ironically, at the same time, two other film companies began production of stories set in Tibet. It was beginning to look as if every Tibetan living in the West would be employed on a film set over the coming months!

Obviously, none of the three projects could obtain permission from the Chinese government to film inside Tibet. And neither the Nepali nor the Indian government would grant permission to film in their countries, where there was at least some geography similar to Tibet and a large number of Tibetan people available as extras.

So Martin Scorsese took his production of Kundun to Morocco in northern Africa, and Brad Pitt and director Luc -- took Seven Years in Tibet to the Andes of South America. Such Hollywood big budget solutions were not an option for us. But we did have the close cooperation of activists inside Tibet and the commitment of the "Young Yaks"--a small group of young Tibetans living in the exile community of Kathmandu.

Although she had no acting experience, the decision to cast Dadon in the role of Dolkar was fairly easy. Not only could she sing beautifully and speak the Tibetan and Chinese dialogue, Dadon had lived many of the experiences and emotions that her character would portray. We also found a remarkable young woman, also with no acting experience, to play the difficult role of Pema, the Buddhist nun. Among other challenges, the role would require her to shave her head!

Since none of the Tibetan roles would be filled with professional actors, it made sense to cast the role of the American girl Amy with a non-actor. Taije Silverman, a talented writer from our home town of Charlottesville, Virginia, who had actually traveled as a student in Nepal and Tibet, fit the role beautifully. And two talented New York actors, Richard Chang and LuYu, played the two parts for Chinese actors, Duanping and Mr. Du.

Apart from director Paul Wagner, the only professional filmmaker recruited in the United States was Director of Photography Steve Schecter. Steve had the perfect mix of professional cinematographic expertise and years of experience working in the third world on ethnographic films for the Smithsonian Institution. Wagner, Tsering and Elliott, who had co-written the screenplay over the previous year, would serve on the production as director, co-director and co-producer. Charlottesville Associate Producers Catherine Dee and Will Kerner rounded out the crew providing continuity and still photography.

So, in September of 1996, the small group of American filmmakers and actors flew to Kathmandu to plan and shoot a feature-length film in a unique, three-month collaboration with the Tibetan exile community. Our key partners in that collaboration were a small group of young Tibetans committed to the cause of a free Tibet who called themselves "The Young Yaks." It was they who pulled together the resources, transportation, props, locations, script translators, and actors for the production.

Public announcements of "casting calls" were out of the question. So the majority of the roles were cast using nothing more than word-of-mouth within the Tibetan community. The result was that we often auditioned only one actor for each role, which at least had the advantage of making the decision-making process easier! Somehow, the whole thing worked. Even casting the major role of Dorjee, we auditioned only one person, Jampa Kelsang, but he played the role beautifully and has gone on to work as a lead actor in several other features.

Our good fortune extended to finding crew members. Tom Grant, a good friend of Julia and Thupten's and an experienced filmmaker who also lived in Kathmandu, quickly became a crucial partner in the project because he understood both the demands of filmmaking and the security issues peculiar to South Asia. Soundman Sam Chapin had never worked in film, but was a skillful sound producer in a small recording studio in Kathmandu. One major concern had been how the filmmakers would find a make-up artist experienced in film work, much less someone who could create the special bruise and wound effects required for the torture scenes. Amazingly, Jampa Kelsang had just started dating a British woman visitor to Kathmandu named Theresa Rene. Theresa was a professional makeup artist from Hong Kong who specialized in martial arts films!

Knowing that the Nepali government would never allow us to film Windhorse the way it was scripted, our original thought was to film the scenes in Kathmandu without permission. After consulting with a few Nepali filmmakers, however, it seemed that this was too risky an idea. We would become very visible, very quickly and the Nepali government would catch on and probably shut us down.

So we took another approach. We submitted various documents and forms to the Nepali Ministry of Information, the governmental office that issues filming permissions, about our project we called "Nightingale" - described as a documentary and music video about a Tibetan singer. Applying for a documentary film permit helped in two ways: the charge was about half of what a dramatic feature permit would have cost and we would not have to submit a full script for review.

We scheduled the shoot to start at the beginning of Tihar - the Nepali New Year celebrations that are like Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years all rolled into one. For two weeks, everyone goes home to their families and business grinds to a halt. It made our project a distraction and low priority for the government bureaucracy. Even better, for our "liaison officer" the ministry assigned a woman who had very little experience with films and spoke absolutely no English, Tibetan or Chinese. We served her tea on the set and made her comfortable, but she understood none of the politically charged dialogue! Over time, she became more and more bored with the filming of scenes she could not understand and came to the set less and less. On days when we would film a particularly sensitive scene, such as one set in a prison, we would call her and say we were taking a "rest day."

Midway through the schedule, we flew with a small crew and two actors to Lhasa, the capitol of Tibet. We left the professional video camera and other gear behind in Nepal, carrying only a small "prosumer" camera, making it possible for us to pose as tourists. This week represented the most dangerous period of filming.

One key to the success of this clandestine filming was the fact that Thupten and Paul had traveled to Lhasa with a small camcorder several months earlier and tested the idea of filming there. One night during that scouting trip, Paul was by himself filming on a dimly lit street in the Tibetan part of town. With his eye to the viewfinder and an occasional fast moving motorcycle light around, he was only vaguely aware of a flash of light that illuminated him. When he looked up, there was a Tibetan monk in his maroon robes walking past, but nothing unusual.

But the next day Thupten learned from a "mole" inside the Chinese secret police that something of interest had been posted on the bulletin board of the PSB-a photo of Paul with a video camera. The monk was a Chinese collaborator and had secretly snapped the picture. The incident inspired a small addition to the script-Dorjee and Dolkar's neighboring monk who turns out to be a spy.

Another night during the Lhasa scout, Paul and Thupten were trying to get shots of the exterior of a Chinese disco. Avoiding the streetlights, they filmed from the shadow of a large tree across the street from the disco. Suddenly, a motorcycle roared up and two plainclothes police jumped off. They examined passports, warned that videotaping was not allowed after dark, and ordered Paul and Thupten back to their hotel. It was disappointing because the filmmakers knew they would need shots of the discos. But a lesson had been learned--be a "dumb tourist" and act like you're not doing anything wrong.

And that's what we did when we returned to Lhasa in the fall of 96. At the disco, for example, we struck up a broken English and Chinese conversation with the police stationed at the entrance to the disco, chatting as we filmed the entrance to the nightclub with its garish neon and flashing lights.

During this week of shooting, we filmed many of the documentary type scenes establishing life in contemporary Lhasa, including many images unique to that place and time-the colorfully dressed pilgrims circumambulating the Barkhor, the glowing butter lamps and deities of the Jokhang temple, and the pervasive presence of Chinese police and security cameras. While we filmed, soundman Sam Chapin cleverly recorded the nowhere-else-on-earth sounds of Lhasa on his DAT recorder with a microphone hidden under his jacket cuff.

Remarkably, we were also able to film dramatic scenes depicting the relationship between the brother Dorjee and the American girl Amy, played by Jampa Kelsang and Taije Silverman. This included several shots of the twosome at the Potala, the former palace of the Dalai Lama, and in the Barkhor where we placed our own cameras near Chinese security cameras to mimic the perspective of their footage in ours. We also filmed (rather nervously!) a scene involving dialogue in the ruins of a temple in Lhasa that had been destroyed by the Chinese. If we had gotten caught filming there, we would have had a very difficult time explaining to the PSB that we were simply naïve tourists who gotten very lost.

Working with the two actors, co-directors Paul Wagner and Thupten Tsering and Director of Photography Steve Schecter could hardly use standard film set procedure. Yelling "Action" and "Cut" in a city full of armed guards and secret police was clearly out of the question, so subtle nods and gestures had to suffice. And the typical process of doing repeated "takes" became atypically dangerous. One day, Wagner and Schecter were grabbing a shot of Silverman and Kelsang entering a temple. But just as they passed by the camera, a large group of Tibetan worshippers obscured the view. Because he felt it was a critical scene, Wagner asked the actors to repeat the action and the second take was successful. But seconds later a Tibetan man ambled to Wagner and Tsering and said, in broken English, "Making movie, hunch?" Very quickly, the little film crew was gone.

How dangerous was it to film secretly inside Tibet? We knew it had been done before by western documentary filmmakers. And we felt that, if we were caught, we would probably face the fate suffered by Julia Elliott years earlier when she was "caught" taking photographs of a demonstration-her camera and film were confiscated and she was kicked out of the country. So we knew it might mean the end of the film project but we would probably not be put in prison. The same could not be assumed for the Tibetans living in Lhasa who provided critical support of the filming. Obviously, they cannot be credited in the film for their hard work, or their courage. Similarly, many of the Tibetans living in Nepal are not credited because their family members in Tibet might be jeopardized, or their situation in Nepal might be politically precarious.

At the end of our week in Lhasa, the crew prepared for the flight by packing up a smuggler's horde of illicit goods-cases of Chinese beer and cigarettes, authentic Chinese disco lights, and police uniforms, caps and decorations-all to be used as props on the sets back in Kathmandu. The most precious cargo, of course, was the ten mini-DV videotapes. Having the footage of the real Lhasa and the surrounding Tibetan countryside would lend remarkable verisimilitude to the story told in the final film.

Besides Lhasa, the other filming location quite remote from Kathmandu was a region along the Nepali/Tibetan border called Mustang. Here, 13,000 feet up in the Himalayan Mountains, we filmed what would become the scenes of the film set in the family's tiny village and the surrounding Anapurna range. At a high mountain pass we came to feel that our project was truly blessed when a sudden gust of wind lifted handfuls of windhorses spiraling into the air, creating the striking images that open and close the film. After a few days filming in Mustang, we boarded a lumbering Old Russian helicopter and returned to Pokhara, and then on to Kathmandu for the final weeks of filming.

Throughout the Kathmandu shoot, we had been concerned that the Chinese would catch wind of what we were doing and put pressure on the Nepali government to stop us. Even within the Tibetan community in Nepal, the Chinese employ spies to keep track of the refugee communities. Through the grapevine we came to learn that among the little crowds of people showing up to watch us film were informants who then reported back to the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu. Our out-of-sequence filming of the scenes probably made it difficult for an outside observer to make sense of the story.

But that security evaporated when we came to the last day of production, shooting the scene of the two nuns protesting against Chinese religious repression, loudly shouting "Free Tibet!" The scene was filmed on a large set depicting the Barkor (the marketplace in Lhasa), involving truckloads of props and over a hundred Tibetan "extras." With so many people and such obvious action, we knew that everyone in Kathmandu would soon know about our film.

Each day throughout the production, the tapes we shot had been taken to an undisclosed location by one of the Young Yaks. No one else knew where they were. The evening after we wrapped the Barkor scene all of the tapes were given to associate producer Will Kerner, who got on plane with them to the US.

The next morning the Nepali police showed up at our hotel. Obviously, the Chinese had caught on and yelled at the Nepalese, who now needed to cover themselves. We were called onto the carpet at the Ministry of Information, where an official demanded that the tapes be surrendered for review. In all honesty we were able to tell him that the material was no longer in Nepal.

Windhorse was "in the can."