The latest film from distinguished documentarian Les Blank, in collaboration with co-director Gina Leibrecht, follows American tea importer David Lee Hoffman to some of the most remote regions of China in search of the world's finest teas. Hoffman is obsessed; during his youth he spent four years with Tibetan monks in Nepal, which included a friendship with the Dalai Lama, and was introduced to some of the finest of teas. Unable to find anything but insipid tea bags in the U.S., Hoffman began traveling to China, the homeland of tea. There, he struggles against language barriers and Byzantine business codes to convince the Chinese that the farmers make better tea than the factories and that their craft should be honored and preserved.
