Opening Night of the inaugural Tibet Film Festival in New York!

“Leaving Fear Behind”

Dir. Dhondup Wangchen | 2008 | Tibet | Tibetan | 25 min

In the months before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, two Tibetans with a single video camera travelled across eastern Tibet and asked ordinary people what they really thought about the Dalai Lama, Chinese rule, and the coming Games. 108 people agreed to speak on camera. The tapes were smuggled out just as protests swept the Tibetan plateau, and the 25-minute film premiered on the opening day of the Olympics. It is a rare, unfiltered record of Tibetan voices from inside Tibet, and the film that inspired the founding of the Tibet Film Festival.

Post-film: Q&A with Leaving Fear Behind director Dhondup Wangchen and Dechen Pemba.

“State of Statelessness”

Tenzin Tsetan Choklay, Tsering Tashi Gyalthang, Ritu Sarin, Tenzing Sonam, Sonam Tseten | 2024 | India | Feature | 106 mins

The first-ever Tibetan-language anthology feature, made by Tibetan filmmakers living in exile in India, America and Vietnam. Its four stories trace what it means to belong to a country you cannot return to. A father in Vietnam tells his young daughter that the Mekong flowing past their new home begins in his homeland. Two sisters reunite to cremate their mother, only to find that years apart have left knots grief alone cannot untie. A couple recovering from a family tragedy is shaken by a visit from an old school friend who has made it in America. And a son returns to his late father’s home in Dharamshala, where he uncovers a secret that challenges his sense of heritage and identity. World premiere: Busan International Film Festival, 2024.

The four films:

At the End, the Rain Stops, by Tenzin Tsetan Choklay

Where the River Ends, by Tsering Tashi Gyalthang

Bardo, by Sonam Tseten

Little Cloud, by Tenzing Sonam & Ritu Sarin

Post-film: Q&A with director Tenzin Tsetan Choklay

About the filmmakers

Tsering Tashi Gyalthang is a Tibetan filmmaker and artist based in Vietnam. Born in India, he studied fine arts in the United States and founded the production house Yeti Films in Vietnam in 2006. His shorts have screened at the Cannes Short Film Corner and the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and his video installations with Charwei Tsai have been shown at the Sharjah and Sydney Biennials and London’s Hayward Gallery.

Sonam Tseten is an independent filmmaker based in Dharamshala. Born in Tibet, he came into exile as a young boy and grew up in India’s Tibetan refugee community. His films, including Tsampa to Pizza, A Girl from China, Pawo (2017) and Pema (2019), mostly deal with separation, reunion and the experience of exile.

Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin have made films together for more than thirty years from their base in Dharamshala. Their work, which centers on Tibetan exile, identity and culture, has been broadcast by the BBC, PBS, Arte and NHK. The Sun Behind the Clouds (2009) won the Václav Havel Award at One World in Prague, and their features Dreaming Lhasa and The Sweet Requiem both premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. They founded and direct the Dharamshala International Film Festival.

Tenzin Tsetan Choklay is a Tibetan American filmmaker based in New York and Dharamshala. With support from the Busan International Film Festival, he studied directing at the Korean Academy of Film Arts in Seoul as one of its first non-Korean students. His documentary Bringing Tibet Home premiered at Busan in 2014, won international awards and was released in more than 40 theaters in South Korea. In 2020 he co-founded the Drung Tibetan Filmmakers’ Collective. His short 1994 was commissioned by the Rubin Museum of Art.

“100 Sunset” follows two young Tibetan women navigating friendship, disappearance, and a quiet economy of survival in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood. Shot with non-professional actors and embedded in real community locations, the film offers a rare and intimate portrait of diasporic life.

Kunsel has recently settled in the Tibetan neighborhood of Parkdale, Toronto. An introverted young woman, she spends her days observing the residents of her apartment complex, and occasionally stealing from them when the urge strikes. She becomes intrigued by a new tenant, Passang, and a friendship quickly develops between the two young women. Passang, who is trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an older man, confides in Kunsel about her plan to escape. As their friendship deepens, Kunsel is drawn into a web of deception that forces her to confront her desires and morals..

“One of the most accomplished Canadian debuts in recent memory.” — Adam Nayman, Toronto Star

Honours: Honourable Mention, Best Canadian Discovery Award, Toronto International Film Festival 2025. Nominated for Best First Feature at the Canadian Screen Awards. Official selection at the Tokyo, Vancouver, São Paulo, Seattle and Sydney film festivals, among many others.

About the filmmaker Kunsang Kyirong is a Tibetan Canadian filmmaker based in Montreal. Her animated short Yarlung (2020) won Best Student Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and Dhulpa (2022) received an honourable mention at the Festival du nouveau cinéma. Her work has been exhibited at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. 100 Sunset, her debut feature, grew out of the years she lived in Parkdale: she cast the film through auditions at a local community centre and spent a year of weekends with her two leads before shooting. Her latest short is Letters from Tibet (2026).

A young man comes face to face with a teacher from his past, and old wounds are reopened. In the misty hill town that has been the heart of the Tibetan exile community for more than sixty years, Tsangdo and his old teacher Gen-Tiger each wrestle with past hardships, present frustrations and what it means to live as a refugee and still find a place to belong. Moody and intimate, Dharamsala is a Tibetan-language drama about identity, displacement and the ties that hold an exile community together.

Post film: Q&A with director Tenzin Dasel

About the filmmaker Tenzin Dasel is an independent Tibetan filmmaker based in Paris and one of the first Tibetan women to direct films. Born in India, she went to school at the Tibetan Children’s Village in Upper Dharamsala. Her experimental short Seeds (2009), shot on a second-hand Super 8 camera, followed young Tibetans in Delhi. Royal Café (2016), about newly arrived Tibetan immigrants in Paris, premiered at the Dharamshala International Film Festival. Dharamsala is her first feature, and premieres here in Washington, D.C.

SHORT FILM COMPETITION - 2026 | Various | Shorts | 60 mins. Audience Award Voting

Now in its 17th year, Tibet Film Festival’s short film competition has become a launchpad for Tibetan filmmakers in Tibet and across the diaspora. Every film in the program had a person of Tibetan heritage in a key creative role, as director, writer, producer or cinematographer. This year’s preselected shorts, each 15 minutes or less, range across documentary, fiction, animation and experimental work, and share a fresh, unconventional take on what Tibetan cinema can be.

You pick the winner. Every audience member gets a ballot. The film with the most votes wins the Washington, D.C. Audience Award and a $500 prize. Separately, an international jury of film professionals, artists and academics will give the $3,000 Yak Prize to the best short of the year. The Yak Prize statuette was designed by Thubten Purang, a Tibetan artist living in Switzerland.

2026 preselection: See the films in competition at tibetfilmfestival.org/2026-preselection.

MY SWEET PALA - Tao Okamoto | 2025| USA | Short
My Sweet Pala

Dir. Tao Okamoto | 2025 | United States | Tibetan & English | 22 min

Eleven-year-old Pema was born and raised in suburban New Jersey by Tibetan immigrant parents: Kelsang, a loving, compassionate stay-at-home dad, and Dolma, a hardworking nurse. Kelsang lived through poverty and exile as a Tibetan refugee, and he wants Pema to appreciate the life they have built in America. Pema, though, cares more about fitting in than about her father’s stories of hardship. Then an unexpected incident shows her how deep her father’s love runs, and what the family faces as “Brown Asians” in America.

Post-film: Q&A with actors Tenzin Dhondup, Pema Shitsetsang, and producer Dechen Kelden, moderated by Tashi Samuels

US PREMIERE: LETTERS FROM TIBET - Kunsang Kyirong | 2026 | Canada | Short | 17 mins

US PREMIERE: ENCOUNTERS - Nyima Murry | 2026 | UK | Short | 30 mins

Special double bill of new documentary short films by two incredible Tibetan women directors, “Encounters: Memories, Museums, Empire and Exile” by Nyima Murry and “Letters from Tibet” by Kunsang Kyirong.

“Encounters” was commissioned to be part of an exhibition at Kedleston Hall - an 18th-century Grade I listed National Trust property in Derbyshire - titled How Did We Get Here?. The exhibition is a collaboration between the National Trust and members of the Tibetan community living in Britain. “Encounters” traces intertwined journeys of displacement experienced by both historical artefacts and a diasporic community to reveal the entangled histories that link Britain’s imperial rule in India with its historic invasion into Tibet. “Encounters” is a moving exploration of memory, identity, ownership, and the enduring legacy of empire.

Both directors Nyima Murry and Kunsang Kyirong will take part in a live Q&A and discussion after the screenings in conversation with Dr. Riga Shakya.

Bios:
Nyima Murry is a British-Tibetan designer and artist. Her research-based practice spans filmmaking, installation, and design to write alternative histories of landscape and the built environment, centring the marginalised and diasporic communities whose presence rarely survives in national or architectural archives.

Kunsang Kyirong is a Tibetan-Canadian filmmaker. Her debut feature 100 SUNSET premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where it was the recipient of the Best Canadian Discovery Award-Honorable Mention. Her work has exhibited at The Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal.