Vultures of Tibet

Russell O. Bush - Director

In the spring of 2010 I stumbled across a photo series of a dead Tibetan man being cut apart and eaten by vultures. It was posted on a popular Internet website and while there were nearly fifty photos, nothing was written to bring context to these arresting images. I later came to find that these photos represented a Tibetan Sky Burial (Jhator), a Buddhist practice of offering one’s body to the benefit of other sentient beings, and that the images had been captured in the politically disputed area between Eastern Tibet and Western China. A little over a year later, I traveled to Tibet through China with a small documentary crew in an attempt to further understand this unique relationship between nature and culture. What we found however was an even deeper and more complicated connection between human and animals.

Under influence from political officials and against the will of nearly all Tibetans in the region, admission prices to attend Sky Burials were being charged for tourists on vacation. This was the direct reason I had seen these photographs on the Internet a year earlier.Upon witnessing this cultural transaction, and the emotional responses of people on both sides of it, I was compelled to widen our lens and create a record that not only revealed how ecology and humanity influence one another at the Sky Burial, but that they are further affected by the proliferation of technology, wealth, and systematic religious oppression.
I believe the narrative our crew captured in Tibet and China is a universal one, bound by neither geography nor time. For me, this film is an attempt to lift the veil of mysticism, commonly projected onto traditional cultures around the world, and engage audiences with a global history of oppression bound in the simple act of looking. It took three years from the time I first encountered those Internet photos of a Sky Burial to the completion of this short subject film; and in that time 120 Tibetans have lit themselves on fire in response to the Chinese political impact in Tibet. It’s my hope that my film confront us as viewers and draw into question the way we interact with a world we are fascinated by, yet often betray without knowing so.