When the CIA secretly funded and trained Tibetan exiles for insurgency against Chinese rule

When you think of exhibitions in Berlin about international geopolitics in the 20th century, your thoughts inevitably turn to the Wall, Checkpoint Charlie and perhaps to museums dedicated to international espionage and the East German secret police.

Shadow Circus, however, is about what one of its curators, Natasha Ginwala, calls an “overshadowed chapter” in the cold war that unfolded well away from its front line in central Europe. Part of the Berlin Film Festival’s experimental Forum Expanded programme, the exhibition documents the unlikely alliance between exiled Tibetans and the CIA which lasted from the 1950s well into the 1970s. The People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet in 1950. In 1959 Tibetans staged a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

Running until March 10 at the Savvy Contemporary gallery in a crematorium turned cultural complex on the northern edge of Berlin, the exhibition is an expansion of The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet, a BBC documentary directed by Indian-based Tibetan filmmaker Tenzing Soram and his partner Ritu Sarin in 1998.

In the film, which is showing on a loop as part of the exhibition, former combatants – among them Tenzing’s late father, Lhamo Tsering – talk about leaving India for the United States to receive training in a high-altitude camp in the state of Colorado. Having not even seen a car before, these men learned the basics of guerilla warfare, and even did airborne drills to prepare for potential parachuting missions into Tibet.

Meanwhile, CIA officers explain the agency’s rationale for supporting and funding the insurgents, and explain how their operation was terminated when Washington began talks with Beijing in the late 1960s.