Nowhere To Call Home
8/20/2015 by Ian Johnson
When the Tibetan farmer Zanta’s husband died, she was forced by local custom to move in with her in-laws, who forbade her son to attend school. Instead, she packed up and moved to Beijing, where she was helped by a relative from another lifetime…(Read more)
8/19/2014 by Eric Meyer
The problem with debates about Tibet, is that they typically escalate into emotionally charged disagreements over Tibet’s historic status as an independent nation, what territory constitutes Tibet today, and whether Tibet should be independent or remain…(Read more)
1/15/2015 by Frank Langfitt
An American filmmaker has made a documentary on Tibet. Those two elements alone might seem grounds for China’s Communist Party to ban it, but instead the film — Nowhere to Call Home — quietly has been making the rounds…(Read more)
11/11/2014 by Shako Liu
Jocelyn Ford had been a foreign correspondent for nearly three decades before making her first documentary, Nowhere To Call Home: A Tibetan In Beijing. The film follows Zanta, a Tibetan street vendor in China, and explores the lives of Tibetans…(Read more)
8/28/2014 by Matthew Bell
Ford was trying to report about life in Tibetan areas of southwest China, which are generally off-limits to foreign reporters. She hoped the woman might have contacts who could help her out, so Ford bought a bracelet as an excuse to…(Read more)
4/27/2015 by Eric Fish
As Beijing-based reporter Jocelyn Ford was preparing for work one morning, she got a desperate call from a Tibetan woman named Zanta who she’d encountered selling jewelry on an overpass two years earlier…(Read more)
12/26/2014 by Yulanda Wang
A documentary film entitled Nowhere to Call Home, produced by independent documentary filmmaker Jocelyn Ford, was screened at Peking University in Beijing on December 24…(Read more)
6/1/2015 by Emily T. Yeh
Veteran radio correspondent Jocelyn Ford has produced a poignant and important documentary that follows the story of Zanta, a rural Tibetan migrant struggling to make a living in Beijing. The film weaves together …(Read more)
2/2015
Overall, ‘Nowhere to Call Home’ is a thoughtful exploration of why we can see the rules of survival differently, and how these rules begin to blur between fractious communities…(Read more)
1/28/2016
Nowhere to Call Home: A Tibetan in Beijing…A startling and affecting film, this is highly recommended. Read More
02/18/2015
A lot of times I’ve been really pleased with the Han Chinese high-school kids in Beijing. A lot have said, ‘Well gosh, we see there’s a problem and what do we do about it? Who should be responsible? Can I, as an individual, do anything?’ …(Read more)
7/9/2014 by Alessandra Spalletta
I met director and Beijing-based journalist Jocelyn Ford in Brussels during the world premiere of her film at the “Millennium Film Festival” and I decided to interview her. She caught my attention because of her curiosity and her…(Read more)
1/1/2015
Earlier this year documentarian and journalist Jocelyn Ford premiered her documentary Nowhere to Call Home in the MoMA’s Lens on Tibet series, followed by a series of screenings at various universities including in Duke University’s Cine…(Read more)
5/9/2014 by Jeremy Blum
There are over 10,000 Tibetans living in Beijing, many of them migrant workers that have moved to the Chinese capital from impoverished regions where the illiteracy rate lies at about 45 per cent…(Read more)
4/16/2014 by Katie Nelson
Nowhere to Call Home follows a Tibetan farmer who leaves her village to work in Beijing for the sake of her son’s education despite overwhelming discrimination…(Read more)
9/1/2014 By Andrew Shiue
In her first venture into film, this radio journalist’s compassionate, storytelling voice personalizes a compelling narrative that serendipitously comes upon suspense and a villain when Ford reluctantly (as a foreign journalist) but eagerly (as a woman) becomes involved with a family feud. Read More
1/4/2016 By LNutchey-Feng
She [Jocelyn Ford] chose this topic because, as she points out very rightly, minority women are often neglected in the media narrative, especially when it comes to Tibet, where Western headlines tend to focus more on the Dalai Lama and the Chinese as aggressors, and less on the more unpleasant aspects of the culture such as shocking gender inequality and mistreatment of women, many of whom are purposefully kept illiterate and experience domestic violence. Read More
1/17/2015 by Raymond Legaspi
A humanities teacher at a top Beijing high school showed the movie to her students, who found it moving. She said that students had no idea how hard a Tibetan’s life could be in the capital, a wake-up call to be nicer and friendlier to migrants. (Read more)
7/29/2016 by Rebecca Kanthor
Interview with Zanta:
“Men and women are not at all equal [in Tibetan society]. If a man goes to another household to help out, the family will give him a special welcome and a wonderful meal. But if a woman goes, no one asks her to stay for a meal. They don’t even say, “Thank you.” If women do as they please, no one will want to marry them. Women who don’t get married are regarded as losers.” (Read more)
09/24/2016 by Brian Hioe
Given the sensitive nature of some subjects, only a documentary film can capture them since a documentary does not require much financial resources or equipment and can largely fly under the radar of authorities. Such would be the case with Jocelyn Ford’s 2014 Nowhere to Call Home: A Tibetan in Beijing. The film allows a poignant look into the lives of Tibetan migrants in Beijing and their plight, while presenting a complex picture of both China and Tibet. (Read more)
8/30/2014
A new documentary shows the hidden, sexism-ridden lives of Tibetan women American reporter Jocelyn Ford only set out to snag some contact in inaccessible Tibet. Instead, when she sat down to talk to a Tibetan woman named Zanta, she ended up as part of her own story, experiencing Zanta’s struggles and the deeply-ingrained sexism of Tibetan society. Read More