Drawing the Tiger

Drawing the Tiger

Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - 6:30pm
  • Library Hall

An award-winning documentary film by Amy Benson, Scott Squire & Ramyata Limbu

A family in Nepal living on less than a dollar a day wins the globalization jackpot: a charity scholarship for their daughter to go to school in the capital city. She promises to return, to free her family from poverty. But she does not return. Drawing the Tiger is an intimate portrait of the price one family pays for their golden opportunity.

Run time: 96 min.

Shot over seven years, Drawing the Tiger takes a sweeping view of one Nepalese family’s daily struggle to survive off of subsistence farming. Eat, pay their debts, stay alive—that’s their day-to-day reality. But when their bright daughter receives a scholarship to study in Kathmandu, the family’s prospects suddenly improve by leaps and bounds overnight. They rest their hopes and dreams on her narrow shoulders, but will the weight of their expectations crush her? Can she really break the cycle of poverty and redefine their collective destiny? She seems eager to try, promising to return and free her family from their hand-to-mouth existence. But when she doesn’t come home, the family is forced to face their fate. Is their future set in stone or sand; is it solid or ever-shifting? Drawing The Tiger is a powerful portrait of pressure and the price one family pays for their golden opportunity that reminds us of what we can and cannot change.