A film on Tibet’s uprising in 1959 directed by Kurseong boy Shenpenn Khymsar has won the best soundtrack for a feature film award at the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival 2025.
Four Rivers Six Ranges won the award at the annual festival held at Dubuque in Iowa, the US, between April 21 and 27. The film, which had rattled China, won the award on April 27, Sunday.
“My film just won the best soundtrack in a feature film here in the US,” Khymsar told The Telegraph.
Khymsar is also the music composer of the film.
The director, who mostly lives in the US, said it was also a comeback of sorts for him. “This is my comeback for the trauma of Broken Wings,”
said Khymsar.
Khymsar had directed the bilingual (Hindi-Nepali) film, Broken Wings, a tragic love story set in the backdrop of the 1986 Gorkhaland agitation “inspired by true events”.
The release of the movie, which was supposed to be held at a function in Gangtok in 2022, had to be cancelled hours before the event following an injunction over copyright issues on one of its songs.
Following this setback, Khymsar directed Four Rivers Six Ranges, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in the Netherlands on February 1.
The film revolves around the Tibetan uprising against the Chinese in 1959 and shows Tibet as an independent country.
Khymsar’s maternal grandfather took part in the 1959 uprising and the family settled in Darjeeling later.
Immediately after its premiere, China accused Khymsar of propagating “separatism”.
The Beijing-headquartered China Global Television Network (CGTN), one of the three branches of the state-run China Media Group and the international division of China Central Television, has accused Khymsar of attempting “a fictitious rewrite of Xizang’s history”. The Chinese refer to Tibet as Xizang.
An article published by the CGTM website on February 1 and last updated on February 5 refers to Khymsar as a “Tibetan exile”.
“Shenpenn Khymsar announced on his Facebook account that the film is dedicated to the 14th Dalai Lama on his 90th birthday, accompanied by an unfounded claim: ‘Xizang was and will never be a part of China.’ His claim is utterly groundless and distorts historical reality,” the opinion piece on the CGTN website states.
The article says that “based on the historical boundaries of China, Xizang is an inseparable part of China”.
“Despite the overwhelming legal, historical, genetic and linguistic evidence that Xizang has always been an inseparable part of China, Khymsar’s film attempts to rewrite this reality,” the article states.