Still, there is a real attempt in Kundun to get beyond the fairy-tale outline and make us feel what it must be like to be a peasant boy suddenly discovered as that reincarnation. On the other hand, it might be nice to see your older brother forced by custom to kow-tow before you. While Seven Years left off at the time of the Chinese invasion, Kundun takes us another eight years further in the history of Tibet, up to the moment in 1959 when the Dalai Lama barely made it across the border into exile in India. The focus of the movie is on the Dalai Lama's struggle to decide whether to stay or leave his country. At first, after the Chinese invasion in 1951, he tried to make the best of a bad situation, even going to Beijing to meet with Mao.
Religion is poison .
Subsequently, the Dalai Lama undergoes his own peculiar mental torture as his countrymen and women, many of them monks and nuns, undergo physical torture and execution at the hands of the relentlessly socialist, modern, anti-religious Chinese. The movie creates a very strong image of the suffering survived by the Dalai Lama in this period, which helps to illuminate his current capacity for understanding and forgiveness. Both these films create a sense of place, though neither was filmed in Tibet. Seven Years used Argentina, Kundun Morocco, but the illusion of the palace and the light in the mountains is reportedly in keeping with the actual experience of Tibet, and the costumes are authentically lavish. Since none of us is likely to visit Tibet any time soon, these movies fill a void by helping us sense what the place must be like.