Tulku Jamyang Kunga Tenzin portrays the Dalai Lama at age 5. Kundun follows Jean-Jacques Annaud's Seven Years In Tibet, which also chronicled the Dalai Lama's life from boyhood to ranking as Tibet's spiritual leader just as China invaded the country amid charges of genocide. Scorsese made no such mistake. Written and co-produced by Melissa Mathison, who penned the E.T. script for Steven Spielberg, Kundun is shot like an epic poem, exquisitely photographed and slightly surreal even within the frame of a chronological story. On the literal level, we meet the Dalai Lama at the age of two, when he is 'discovered' in 1937 by holy men who decide that this peasant child is the reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and therefore in line to be educated and trained as the Dalai Lama.
Nothing seems exaggerated.
Sensationalism is absent, even in the later passages during the Chinese reign of terror. Which means that, instead of feverish emotions, the film is as restrained, interior and spiritual as the Dalai Lama himself.