Martin Scorsese · 1997 · exile

Martin Scorsese's 1997 film of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, from his identification as a small boy in a farming village in Amdo to his flight out of Tibet in 1959. Taken to Lhasa to be enthroned, he grows up into an occupation he cannot negotiate his way out of, and finally leaves at night in disguise for a two-week crossing of the Himalaya.

1. 1
   Taktser

   In the village of Taktser in Amdo, a search party arrives at a farmhouse and lays out objects belonging to the previous Dalai Lama. A two-year-old picks the right ones, and says of them, correctly, that they are his.

2. 2
   Lhasa

   Brought to Lhasa and enthroned in the Potala, he grows up among regents and rituals - and is barely a teenager when Chinese troops enter the country and he must negotiate with Mao for a nation he has never governed.

3. 3
   Lhuntse Dzong

   Slipping out of the Norbulingka at night in a soldier's coat as the shelling begins, he crosses southern Tibet by pony and on foot to Lhuntse Dzong, repudiates the Seventeen-Point Agreement and asks Nehru for asylum.

4. 4
   The Karpo Pass

   Ill and exhausted, the party climbs to the Karpo Pass, the last before the frontier - and an unmarked aircraft passes low overhead, close enough that everyone on the track understands they have been seen.

5. 5
   Tawang

   They cross the border into India near Tawang after two weeks in the mountains - and the film ends with an Indian guard asking whether he is the Lord Buddha, and the answer that he is a reflection, like the moon on water.