Balloon
Description
Tibet’s leading director, Pema Tseden (Old Dog, Festival 2012), continues his masterful chronicles of family life on the steppes with this humorous, touching, and ribald film. Belief in reincarnation coupled with a masculine ethos about virility prevent Dargye from supporting his wife’s wish to terminate her fourth pregnancy, in spite of China’s two-child policy. Using condoms as a pointed narrative device – the couple’s young sons think they are balloons – Tseden contrasts the adult challenges of relationships and sexuality with the playful naivety of childhood.
“[Tseden’s] beautiful, funny, and tragic newest film, Balloon, [is] both a gorgeously intimate family drama and an idiosyncratic artistic statement flecked with humor and sorrow, but alive always to the co-existence of the banal with the spiritual.” –Jessica Kiang, Variety
Trailer
Biographies
Pema Tseden is a native of Amdo in the Tibetan Region of Qinghai Province and the first filmmaker in China to make movies in the Tibetan language. Educated at the Beijing Film Academy, his first feature, The Silent Holy Stones (Festival 2006), won the jury award for Best Directorial Debut at the Beijing Student Film Festival. His other works include Old Dog (Festival 2012); Tharlo (2015), based on his own short story, for which Tseden won the Golden Horse Film Festival’s Golden Horse Award for Best Adapted Screenplay; and Jinpa (2018), winner of the Venice Horizons Award for Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival.