The Producers

Yangzom Brauen — Director

Yangzom Brauen (pronounced YANG-zom) is an award-winning film and television director with an international career spanning Europe and the U.S. Her breakout short film Born in Battle, which tells the story of child soldiers, earned global acclaim, winning the CICT-UNESCO Enrico Fulchignoni Award and the UNESCO Gandhi Medal. It was screened during a UN committee meeting in Geneva and won the Audience Award at the prestigious Max Ophüls Preis 2016, a leading European festival for emerging talent.

Following a 2018 screening of Born in Battle in Los Angeles, Yangzom was offered her first directing role on NCIS: Los Angeles, launching a steady career in U.S. television. She has since directed episodes for Hawaii Five-0, Station 19, Magnum P.I., MacGyver, Rebel (ABC), The Republic of Sarah (CW), and Death and Other Details (Hulu), starring Mandy Patinkin. With over 30 hours of episodic TV under her belt, her credits also include Sweet Magnolias (Netflix), American Horror Stories (FX), Walker Independence (CW), and FBI and Law & Order franchises (CBS/NBC).

Beyond film and TV, Yangzom is a passionate advocate for Tibetan freedom and identity. In 2009, she authored the memoir Across Many Mountains, which became a European bestseller, translated into 12 languages. The book chronicles the journey of three generations of Tibetan women: her grandmother, a Tibetan nun; her mother; and herself.

Born and raised in Bern, Switzerland, Yangzom grew up at the crossroads of cultures. Her father, Swiss anthropologist Martin Brauen, and her mother, a Tibetan artist, instilled in her both a deep connection to her Tibetan heritage and a love for the arts. She studied at the University of Theater and Music in Bern, later performing in Swiss and German theater productions. She gained national recognition starring in a popular Swiss sitcom and became a well-known actress in German-language television and film. Her Hollywood breakthrough came with her role as “Inari” in the sci-fi film Aeon Flux, starring Charlize Theron.

Yangzom lives in Los Angeles and works internationally. She speaks five languages fluently: Tibetan, Swiss German, German, English, and French.

Martin Brauen — Director

Martin Brauen (b. March 15, 1948) is a Swiss anthropologist, curator, and author with a distinguished career in museum curation and cultural research. He served as research associate, deputy director, and interim director at the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich, and was a private lecturer at the University of Zurich. From 2008 to 2011, he was chief curator of the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. Following that, he curated numerous exhibitions in Switzerland, collaborating with institutions such as Museum Rietberg, the Art Museum Bern, and the Art Museum Basel.

Brauen has curated nearly 100 exhibitions across Switzerland, the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Austria. His work spans the cultures of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Ladakh, and Japan, and in recent years, has included Western contemporary art. He has collaborated with artists such as Bill Viola, Charmion von Wiegand, Wolfgang Laib, and Theaster Gates. His most notable books and exhibitions include The Mandala, Dreamworld Tibet, and Bamboo in Ancient Japan.

An innovator in the use of media in cultural storytelling, Brauen integrates audiovisual tools such as photography, computer animations, and film into his projects. In 1972, he collaborated with Hermann Schlenker in northern India to film significant Tibetan cultural and religious events, including a Bönpo death ceremony, the Great Prayer Festival in Dharamsala, Tibetan New Year rites, and itinerant storytellers. In 1976/77, he filmed monastery dances and oracles in Ladakh

Making The Film

Director's Statement

The number of people forced to leave their homelands has never been greater. Their reasons are many: war, hunger, persecution. But behind every statistic is a personal story, a face, a longing. MOLA tells one of those stories - our family’s story - and, in doing so, touches on something deeply human: the enduring dream of return.

Our film centers on Mola, a 100-year-old Tibetan nun, mother, grandmother, and spiritual guide. She has spent more than half a century in exile, yet never gave up the hope of returning to the land of her birth, Tibet. Her dream was simple: to die where she was born. But nothing about her journey was simple.

As her daughter Sonam (Yangzom’s mother and Martin’s mother-in-law) faces the unimaginable challenge of saying goodbye after 65 years of shared life, we witness a profound story of love, separation, resilience and of a quiet but powerful political tragedy. Mola's wish to return was ultimately denied, not because of her actions, but because of a system that fails to recognize the dignity of an old woman with nothing more than a last wish to return to Tibet.

This film is deeply personal for us. Mola was not just our protagonist, she was our family. We’ve lived in her presence, listened to her stories, watched her light incense every morning, and silently observed the strength with which she bore exile, loss, and old age. Her life, anchored in faith, compassion, and quiet resistance, taught us more than any textbook ever could.

Mola never bowed to the expectations of the world around her. Since donning the red and yellow robes at age five, she had no need for make-up or mirrors, no desire to conform. She aged naturally and unapologetically. In her, we saw what Susan Sontag once described: a woman who chose wisdom over niceness, strength over grace, and truth over pretense.

Her life reminds us that the so-called “archaic” values: kindness, humility, discipline, spiritual focus, are not obsolete. They’re rare. And they’re powerful.

We made this film not just to honor her, but to explore the questions she leaves behind: What does it mean to live a meaningful life? To age with dignity? To resist injustice without bitterness?

Mola's path was often painful and uncertain, but guided by a clear inner compass. As she once told us, “If you have good thoughts, the earth and the path are passable.” With this film, we tried to walk that path alongside her and share it with the world.

— Yangzom Brauen & Martin Brauen October 2, 2024