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* World peace - can it be influenced by a movie or two? Helen Brew is sure it can. She talks to Diana Dekker.
AFTER eight years of preparation, New Zealand film-maker Helen Brew is at last in sight of the real Tibet. She and her crew will - if the vagaries of dealing with Chinese officialdom do not intervene in the last weeks - be in Tibet in July, the first film crew to be allowed to film extensively inside Tibetan monasteries.
Brew is known for her films Birth with R D Laing (1977) and China in Change - The One Child Family (1984). Until now she hasn't been to Tibet, but has seen film taken by Chinese officials.
After Tibet - probably a week of acclimatising and two weeks of filming - she and her crew of eight will travel to the Taklamakan Desert to film a tribe "discovered" by a Chinese oil exploration team in 1990. She doesn't believe they will have changed much.
"They are still totally isolated and in a most desolate and dangerous area."
Brew says the tribe, with nothing in Western terms, appears to "live in a microcosm of peace. We will find out the truth or not as to whether they...