The Immortal Heart

Five Taiwanese teenagers, faced with sweeping and untested educational reforms in 1996, revealed their dreams in the CommonWealth Magazine documentary "A Generation Freed." Their lives were then revisited in 2006 in the film "A Generation Freed - 10 Years Later" to see how the more liberal education system had affected them. Now, another decade later, we find out in "A Journey of 35" if indeed they were able to chase their dreams and if their horizons have grown brighter with adulthood or become more cynical.

Tsunma, an honorific term connoting “noble, delicate, and pure”, refers to the Tibetan Buddhist Nuns of the Himalayan Region who have been largely dismissed or forgotten by the traditions they follow and the societies they’ve served. Taiwanese photographer Lin Li-Fang undertook a solo journey up 4,270 meters into the Himalayan Plateau and lived for an entire summer with some of these nuns and recorded life in the unforgiving environment dubbed “The Roof of the World”. There, Li-fang captured a life devoted to hope and faith and a people possessing a unique kind of tolerance, humility, and perseverance. This is a story of the Nuns of the Himalayas, of seeing one’s life through theirs, that is, a life lived in faith and with the spark of a summer eternal.