This website uses cookie

We use cookie to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners who may combine it with other information that you’ve provided to them or that they’ve collected from your use of their services.

Privacy policy

Marketing cookie are used to track visitors across websites. The intention is to display ads that are relevant and engaging for the individual user and thereby more valuable for publishers and third party advertisers.

To Alexandra

To Alexandra

Yi Cui 2025 71 min China / Canada/ USA

2023-致亚历山卓_EnTib-01-1e22970cc56a9e4802f75ae452fc5f70

致亞歷珊卓 – Yi Cui

Two travelogues intertwined.

A collage.

A correspondence.

Through text, researcher-writer Alexandra David-Néel’s journey across the Himalayas a century ago unfolds via her letters home—seeking answers in a world fractured by colonial entanglements, wars, and human ferocity.

In audiovisual spaces, the filmmaker’s experiences in eastern Tibet are reflected via her own lens and those of native Tibetan people. What begins through her encounter with a legendary school in the region becomes, by the film’s completion, an elegy — as violence eclipses “history”, yet fails to erase memory.

Meandering between past and present, the work invites viewers into a meditative space open to contemplations on life, death, history, remembrance, the self, and more.

Director

Yi Cui

Yi Cui is a Chinese media artist whose practice engages time-based forms as a way of listening, thinking and relating. Through her framework “Migrating Cinema,” she explores intersections between grassroots filmmaking, expanded cinema, traveling projection, and ancient screen arts such as shadow theatre. For over a decade she has worked with communities in Eastern Tibet, supporting audiovisual creation by grassroots filmmakers. Her work has screened at Rotterdam, Images, Viennale, and many more festivals. and received awards including the Grand Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and the Libraries’ Award at Cinéma du Réel.