Moths
Director: Pema Yeshe Baldwin
Cast:Tsering Dhondup, Tsering Dorjee Bawa
Crew:Writer: Tsering Dhondup. Producer: Tsering Dhondup. Director of Photography: Niko Cvitanic; Producer: Tsering Dhondup; Editor: Pema Yeshe Baldwin; Gaffer: Matan Fields; Production Assistant: Tenzin Phentok; Location Sound Engineer: Phillip Wallace; Set Design: Maiya Ponsky; Costume Design: Sarah Beth Parks; Dialect Coach: Tenzin Rabgay; Mandarin Translator: Dolma Kyab; Sound Design: Jack Fay; Original Score: Elizabeth Hall-Keough; Color: Sam Fischer; Graphic Design: James Blue; Special Thanks: Canaan West Ranch, John Rice, Reanna Swanson, Tashi Meditation Center, Mónica Sánchez, Arom Choi, Colorado College Theater Department, Colorado College Asian Studies Department, Colorado College Film and Media Studies Department, Ren Dara Santiago, Ishaan Bay, Tulku Jamyang Kunga, David Resch, Lou Ann Zachariah
Email:pema.baldwin@gmail.com
Synopsis
In Western Tibet, father and son yak herders await an insurance inspection. The son has planned an escape, but when a yak goes missing, complications arise.
Trailer
About the director
Pema is a Tibetan-American filmmaker living in New York City. Raised between Montana and New Mexico, he spent summers with his family in a nunnery in Pharping, Nepal. While studying at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, he made his first fiction short "Split Ends" (2021), which was an official selection at the Santa Fe International Film Festival and an award winner at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth. Informed by his Buddhist upbringing, Pema’s work focuses on themes of family and belonging, featuring elements of myth and the supernatural.
Filmmaker's note
There was a certain sense of desolation that this story required, so we approached this film with an emphasis on crafting atmosphere. Layers of howling wind, cracked lips, red cheeks. Hope, desperate as it is here, was to be born from and die in these conditions.
Traditional nomadic practices in the Tibetan steppe region are waning, and the climate is rapidly changing. The future of our homeland and its many cultures is uncertain. Where is it headed? Is there a place for us there? Do we have a choice? We ask these questions without an answer; they linger and congeal, and we wonder.
As Tibetans in diaspora, we relied on family stories and accounts, research through books and the internet, and films from Tibetan auteurs such as Pema Tseden. True to that diasporic experience, we shot this project not in Tibet, but in the Wet Mountains of Colorado. We sourced props from meditation centers, backyards, and butcher shop garbages. We asked many favors and were lucky a number of times when it mattered.