drung co-founder tenzin tsetan choklay speaks to travel+leisure magazine

Tibetan filmmaker and Drung Film Collective co-founder Tenzin Tsetan Choklay on exile, identity, and storytelling across borders.

In 2013, when Tenzin Tsetan Choklay first premiered his documentary, Bringing Tibet Home, he wondered whether international audiences would be able to connect with the story of a man who smuggled 20,000 kilos of Tibetan soil into India, hoping to offer his people a small piece of the homeland they longed to return to. What he discovered during the film’s festival run was that the story travelled far beyond the Tibetan diaspora. From Japan to Mexico to South America, audiences found echoes of their own lives within it—of separation, migration, memory, and the complicated ache of belonging somewhere from afar.

“Our origins as Tibetan refugees have created a community that now exists across many borders and geographies. Over the decades, Tibetans in exile have built lives across India, North America, Europe, and East Asia, and in many ways, our lives have been shaped more by movement than rootedness.”

“That feeling of displacement, impermanence, and constantly moving between worlds naturally finds its way into my work. It often feels as though the whole world is our home and, at the same time, nowhere fully is.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE by Maaheen Siddique

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