The real Tibet

It was a dusty but deliciously warm May Day in Beijing. Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City were so packed with Chinese tourists making the most of the holiday that it was impossible to move. I was thankful to escape the crowds in one of the world's cheapest taxi rides back to the airport with a very precious cargo. Would I make it unscathed through customs and onto the flight to Heathrow and safety?

To say producing A Year in Tibet was a marathon, I think, is something of an understatement. It all started what seems like a very long time ago now, back in the summer of 2003, when Peter Firstbrook and I were approached by a Chinese producer in London who wanted to embark on a joint venture to turn some of his footage, shot in Tibet, into a TV series the world might be interested in seeing. What he showed us was extraordinary material - beautifully shot images of people and places - but that was really it. Where were the characters? What were their stories? What was going on in their lives? What does it mean to be Tibetan in a country that has, since 1952, been part of the Peoples' Republic of China? So many questions, and in our minds no answers.

Peter's last foray into Tibet had been to make Lost on Everest, to date the largest-grossing single documentary ever distributed by BBC Worldwide. The only way for us to begin to answer our questions was to get into Tibet ourselves and make our own TV series.

So, how to get access to a country where most of the population lives at an altitude of 5,000 meters and higher, which is under constant scrutiny by the Chinese authorities, and still be able to observe its people, its culture and its way of life in a manner that would not attract the unwanted attention of the Ministry of Propaganda?

What followed was nearly three years of protracted negotiation and discreet dealings. Access at the highest levels and of the quality we wanted and needed was finally secured by the writer Sun Shuyun, who had previously worked on access for a couple of films in China for the BBC and was now going to direct all the location filming. She spent more than a year eliciting the support of the head of the Tibetology Centre in Beijing whereby Sevenstones Media entered into a deal with a Chinese production company to work with our team of Chinese and Tibetan cameramen and production personnel, effectively as a 'Chinese' production unit. Convoluted as it may sound, but having spent most of my professional life making docs with indigenous filmmakers in some of the most challenging places on Earth, I knew that so long as we could keep the authorities at arms length, what I could expect to see in the rushes would be amazing.

We finally started shooting in July 2006. Peter made a few trips to Tibet in his official position with the Chinese as a 'consultant' that summer and autumn and worked with Shu on identifying a cast of characters from the small town of Gyantse, about a five-hour drive from the capital Lhasa, and surrounding villages.