Passage of a trailblazer

By Bertil Lintner

CHIANG MAI - Adrian Cowell, one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of our time, passed away in London earlier this month. The last time we met, in Bangkok in July, he brought me a DVD copy of one of his first and still historically important documentaries: Raid into Tibet.

The remarkable black-and-white film was shot in 1964 when he, Chris Menges, a cinematographer and film director who later earned worldwide fame for directing movies such as The Killing Fields, The Mission and The Boxer, and George Patterson, a Scottish missionary and author who was fluent in Tibet’s Khampa language, became the first and only Westerners to venture into the country with the armed Tibetan resistance, which at that time was active in the Himalayas.

This unlikely trio followed a group of nine Tibetan guerrillas with eight rifles between them into Tibet. Traversing a mountain pass at an altitude of more than 5,000 meters above sea level, they reached the heights overlooking the Kodari Highway, from where the Tibetan guerrillas ambushed a Chinese army convoy.

Cowell told me that on their return to Kathmandu, Nepal, Patterson made the mistake of telling the British ambassador what they had seen and done. The ambassador then told King Mahendra, the king of Nepal, about their exploits and the Nepalese police tried to hunt them down.

in full: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/MJ18Ae01.html