Welcome to Indigenous Lenses!
Indigenous Lenses is a 501(c)3, Utah-based non-profit corporation dedicated to ethnographic, documentary film and video productions for educational, cultural, and scientific purposes.
Our productions will focus on indigenous healers from around the world, recording their stories within the context of their cultures.
Emphasis will be placed on those healers and healing practices threatened with extinction through acculturation and/or assimilation.
The corporation shall also engage in humanitarian work in the communities where we film to help bring education to the girls of those communities, provide food and shelter to indigent Tibetan elders in the refugee camps and support eye and medical care for the Nepali and Tibetan communities.
Current Project: Fate of the Lhapa
Fate of the Lhapa is a feature-length documentary about the last three Tibetan
shamans (lhapas) living in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal. With no other
descendants to carry on their healing practices and a younger generation attending
schools, acculturating, and modernizing, these “sucking doctors” are
practicing an endangered tradition. Each lhapa requested that their story
be filmed. Their fear was that the next heir might not appear until after
their own deaths. Subsequently, with no lhapa alive to mentor the children,
the documentary would be used to transmit the knowledge to the next generation.
Their tales of nomadic childhoods, shamanic callings and apprenticeships,
cosmologies of disease and treatments, and of their flight from Tibet during
the Chinese occupation in the late 1950s is be juxtaposed with images of present-day
life in the camp, current healing practices and shared concerns of the future and
the fate of their tradition. This is a touching portrayal of life in exile
in a refugee camp in Nepal. Click Here for more information.
You can support Indigenous Lenses through the following links:
