I happened to read more about this film on Wikipedia & the film festivals it has travelled to. Watched it. Incredibly understated presentation of an extremely powerful story. This one is very European and in my opinion, it has been treated softly-deliberately by the filmmakers. Unless you watch this film at least 2 times, you won't get it. Very spiritual, healing and yet gut wrenching. The actors are not performing, they are just being themselves which gives that cinematic yet amateur feel. Excellent Sound, Direction, Cinematography ***** and Performances. The editing could have been better but that is a "cliché" which can be passed. The film overall lives and lingers and that is all that matter. The singer-What a voice-Take a Bow.

She grows on you,Worth a couple of watches alone .It is serious stuff.

Before getting into it, I'd like to say that I understand why people feel the need of giving a high rate to a movie that exposes real life injustices, I can understand that it almost feels necessary to defend such movies. But I don't do anything just because it is "politically correct". If someone makes an awful movie about children being killed in Palestine, well, yes, it is an awful thing that happens everyday and it is a topic that must be addressed in films so the public knows what is going on... but that doesn't make the movie any less awful.

Now, about the Nightingale of Tibet.

Why 2 stars? I don't even know where to start...

There is no script behind it, most of the movie we see people walking through the streets while we listen to a song. Sometimes that first song ends and a second one plays while the person keeps walking. There are maybe 6 scenes in the whole movie, the rest of the time it feels like I'm watching one of those Lonely Planet Travel Documentary from the old days, you know, music, sparse dialog, random shots of food, bicycles, cars and dogs in some remote place in Asia.

Some other times the draggy voice-over is telling us what is happening (supposedly), but the images don't show it (there is a clear example at the scene where the protagonist is escaping from jail: the voice over tells us "and she walked; she walked even further for days on end leaving it all behind", but the protagonist is STILL in prison, looking around and trying to find an exit. So even that is wrong.

Some other times, that voice-over explains what is going on in the character's heads, but we don't really see anything related to that. The actors are probably walking around the city.

Dialogs are missing 90% (the voice over tells us what they talked about) of the time, and absolutely ridiculous the remaining 10%. Edit is just awful, with zero attention to detail and without rhythm. Music choice is constantly bad, with no real attention to whether the song matched with the (intended) emotion on the screen (if any); if they wanted to just play a bunch of songs by Yoga Gyalnang, they should have made an album.

So... if the movie is so bad, Why 2 stars?

One because the story could be interesting (even though stories like this have been told over and over again).

The other one because I believe this movie could be used as a blueprint of 'How not to shoot/edit/direct a film. And that adds certain value to it.