Feature: Rural projectionist heralds cinematic joy for Tibetan villagers

LHASA, May 31 (Xinhua) -- As twilight fell, it was time for the sheep to return to the fold and for villagers to unwind after wrapping up a long day's work.

As everyone settled in for a relaxing evening, Lodro loaded the projector, screen and stereo onto his pick-up truck and left for a nearby village to show a movie.

The 62-year-old Lodro hails from Damxung County in Lhasa, capital of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, and has worked as a rural projectionist for over 37 years. He has shown free movies in nearly 200 villages in the county since 1985.

As soon as Lodro stopped his truck in Barling Village and unpacked the equipment, kids rushed to help him set up the open-air cinema.

"Everything seems like a dream," said Ngawang Chodron, a six-year-old Tibetan girl. It is her first time watching a movie in an open-air cinema.

Lodro was 10 years old when he first watched a movie. That's when he saw a "hi-tech and mysterious" projector for the first time and was left fascinated. "The projector inside the huge iron box was considered to be extremely precious and was not allowed to be touched," he recalled.

Later, when the county needed film projectionists, Lodro applied for the job and was hired.

Lodro has used five different projectors so far, the first of which was in the 1980s and it could only screen black and white movies.

He said at the beginning the movies were only in Mandarin, and now villagers can watch movies in both Mandarin and Tibetan language.

Watching movies was a rare pastime for herdsmen in the 1980s and 1990s, and Lodro was like a "star" among villagers. He recalled that some villagers would even take a long walk at night from a neighboring village to watch a movie. At the end of the movie, villagers would often dance and sing by the screen.

Nowadays, smartphones and television sets are widely used in the region, but Lodro's open-air cinema remains a popular pastime among villagers. For them, the cinema is not only a place to enjoy a movie, but also an opportunity for people in surrounding villages to spend the evening together.

Unlike in the past when people only had access to a limited variety of movies, the films screened today are of different genres and subjects, including action and war movies as well as documentaries on livestock farming and breeding. The audience can even choose movies based on their own tastes and preferences.

Tibet currently has nearly 500 rural projection teams working across the region's remote villages, and they screened over 66,000 movies in 2021.

Local authorities are planning to gradually move the open-air cinemas indoors, so as to provide the villagers with a more convenient and comfortable movie-watching environment.

Lodro said that he is happy to screen films anywhere be it on windy grasslands or in indoor cinemas "as long as people can bask in the joy of the flickering screen."