Altash
(Bribes d'une vie)
Léo Mattei
2005 - 75 min - DV Cam - Couleur - France

Portrait of Altash, twenty-nine years old, a Tibetan refugee, nowadays a garbage man in Dharamsala (Northern India).
We follow him in his everyday life, at work on his way to and from the dump; we spend with him the Tibetan New Year’s holiday. Little by little, walking in his tracks, we enter his private life as well as the other side of a world which is like a legend for western imagination.
Altash talks about exile, about his own story and, going back to his childhood, he tells us about his experience of "Tibetan Children’s Villages" (Tibetan schools) and about problems issued from a "sponsored" education.
In the background, we can guess what difficulties and questions his generation has to face, confronted as it is to the inescapable influences of the western world.