A documentary by Tom and Sue Peosay featuring the Dalai Lama. In English and Tibetan and Mandarin with English subtitles. Unrated.

Why should we care about a faraway place bound to wildly esoteric traditions? The answer you get from this excellent and disturbing documentary is really another question: Why should we care about the air we breathe and the water we drink?

Filmmakers Tom and Sue Peosay happened to be in Tibet in 1987 during a short-lived uprising by Buddhist monks and nuns--something brutally squashed, like every other expression of autonomy, by the Chinese, who have been ethnically cleansing the country since annexing it in 1950. In Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion, the Peosays (working with writer Victoria Mudd) use this material and much more to lay out the history of a mountaintop region that developed its inner potential for more than a millennium--a rain forest of the human spirit, if you will--only to be cruelly despoiled in the past half-century.

The movie, narrated by Martin Sheen, with voice-over translations delivered by the likes of Ed Harris and Susan Sarandon, doesn't spare the role of the U.S. in all this. The CIA backed insurgents as a thorn in China's side until Richard Nixon cozied up to Beijing in the early 1970s, subsequently pushing the task of decrying Communist human-rights abuses to the left. Beijing's side is heard via various waxen-faced functionaries, who invariably begin their feeble assertions with phrases like "In my opinion..." that do little to mitigate the effect of elderly nuns talking about years of systematic rape and torture in Chinese prisons. And then there's the sight of Tibetans being reduced by colonizers to a state roughly equivalent to that of Native Americans in the late-19th century.

What's most remarkable here, aside from frequently breathtaking footage of the Himalayan land and its weather-worn people, is the persistently openhearted attitudes expressed by long-time Tibet hands such as Englishman Robert Ford, Yank Robert Thurman (Uma's dad, by the way), and the Dalai Lama himself, who speaks eloquently of compassion undiminished by cruelty. Even the non-Buddhistically inclined will come away from this expertly made doc with a sense that, if we plan to sleep at night, we should probably leave the roof of the world at least a little intact.