Source: The Salt Lake Tribune

http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_3428894

On January 23, 2006 The Salt Lake Tribune reported, "Almost every documentary filmmaker shares the travails of raising money and finding distribution for their movies. Those hurdles are nothing, though, compared with the lengths to which two Swiss directors went to make their respective films premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Christian Frei, director of 'The Giant Buddhas,' and Luc Schaedler, director of 'Angry Monk - Reflections on Tibet,' had to deal with tribal Afghan 'warlords,' tight-lipped Chinese government officials and arrests to get their respective films finished... Frei's film uses the Taliban's destruction of the giant Buddha statues in the Bamiyan valley of Afghanistan as a jumping-off point for an intriguing treatise on the significance of the statues to the Buddhist religion and to look at other giant Buddhas built along the Silk Road trading from China to India... Schaedler's film tells the story of Gendun Choephel, a rebellious Tibetan Buddhist monk in the early 1900s who questioned his country's conservative religious climate and insular political attitudes. He traveled through Tibet, Sri Lanka and India in an effort to better understand the history of his homeland, becoming a threat to both Tibet's religious elite and the conquering Chinese government in the process."