Within a culture long revered for spirituality and a high value placed on inner beauty, a maverick Tibetan promoter engages in a most un-Tibetan undertaking: a western-style beauty pageant. Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile follows Tenzin Khecheo, a Tibetan-American teenager from Minnesota as she travels to the Indian Himalayas to compete in this “beauty pageant with a difference.”
Pageant founder Lobsang Wangyal seeks to fill a void within the Tibetan exile community by bringing a bit of glamour into his corner of the world. Complete with catwalks and evening gowns, he sees his pageant as an opportunity for exiled Tibetan women to both immerse themselves in Tibetan culture and to add their voices to global fight for a free Tibet by using the pageant as a unlikely political platform.
