Thanks to everyone who attended the first official North American screening of “Island in the Sky”. It only took twenty years to show it! In case you’re interested in the back story (or at least some of it)… in the spring of 1987, I found myself in need of some good old fashioned escapism, due to the pressures of my life and career. I asked my good friend and neighbor, Anthony Souter, if he would be interested in traveling to China with me to “make a film”. Fortunately, he was thrilled at the prospect, and after a few months of getting ourselves organized (we thought), we set out for Asia… first stop: Hong Kong. We stayed for a few days, acclimatizing ourselves to the steamy environment, and picking up some bargains in sound recording stuff.

We took an overnight boat trip to Guangzhou (at that time still called Canton), and while waiting for the youth hostel to open, got talking to some fellow travelers, who had just returned from Tibet. This was exciting news indeed, since we had been informed that travel in Tibet was off-limits. Thinking that the best way to get there would be to go as far by train as we could, we set off on a 33-hour train journey to Chengdu, in the western province of Sechuan. While this experience, and the unfamiliar atmosphere of Chengdu were unforgettable, it seemed like we might have chosen a better way to get to Tibet. Recent rains had made the roads pretty much impassable. 22 days in a [Jeep] was one of the options we faced. (Looking back on this now, had we the time, that would have been pretty spectacular!)

We decided to bite the bullet, and get on a China Airways flight to Lhasa. Landing in Tibet was incredible, not least of all because we had survived a flight on China Airways, a company not famous for its impeccable safety record. We found ourselves in a beautiful highland landscape with crystal blue skies. It was, we had been told, imperative that we “take it easy” for a few days, to get ourselves used to the altitude (about 3500 meters above sea level). We got ourselves checked into a dorm room at the Yak Hotel, in downtown Lhasa, and “took it easy” for as long as we could bear. A few hours later, we ventured out into the center of the old town, and got caught up in the evening ritual of walking around the main monastery; the Jokhang, three times. It was like being on a different planet, yet somehow really comfortable.

As the days passed, our excursions became more and more ambitious, the longest being a 3-day trip to a horse-trading/racing, match-making festival that the Chinese were allowing the Tibetans to celebrate for the first time in almost thirty years. We filmed often, and I took still images as well. We had packed our backpacks to the brim with super-8 film, which we shot at 9 frames per second (mostly) to save film. When asked by our fellow travelers what we were doing, we told a little “story” about how we were shooting a documentary for Channel Four, in the UK. It was handy to have an answer, and made us feel like we had a legitimate project – a discipline we could stick to.

The irony is that we got back to England in the autumn of 1987 and sold the project to Channel Four! The broadcast premier of “Island in the Sky” took place in June, 1988.