The following is the text of a presentation by filmmaker Tenzin Tsetan Choklay, one of three panellists at a discussion titled “The Current Status and Future Prospects of Tibetan Journalism,” held on 15 September 2026 to mark the 30th founding anniversary of Tibet Times.
Tashi Delek
First of all, congratulations to Bhod Kyi Dhu Bhab (Tibet Times) on this anniversary, and thank you for inviting me.
When I was asked to speak about the future of Tibetan journalism, my first thought was: I’m not a journalist. I’m a filmmaker. So I wasn’t quite sure what I could contribute to this conversation. But filmmakers and journalists do share something fundamental. We observe, we listen, we document, and we tell stories.
I have also always felt that I work somewhat from the fringe of our community — not quite an insider, and not quite an outsider. I grew up within the Tibetan community, so this is the world I know. But filmmaking has also taught me to step outside that familiarity and look back at it. Sometimes a little distance allows us to notice things that have become too familiar to see.
A journalist often asks: What is happening now? As a filmmaker, particularly when making documentaries, I often find myself asking: What will this moment mean twenty years from now? And I think Tibetan journalism needs to ask both of these questions because what we document today is not only news. It may eventually become history.
In 2013, I made a documentary called Bringing Tibet Home. The film followed Tibetan contemporary artist Tenzing Rigdol and his project to bring 20,000 kilos of Tibetan soil into India, creating an installation where Tibetans in exile could walk on soil from Tibet. At the time, I was documenting an artist, an artwork, and the Tibetan community responding to it. I wasn’t thinking, “I am creating an archive.”
But more than a decade later, the film has taken on another life. It was the first feature documentary to focus on Tibetan contemporary art, and it has since been used as research and reference material in the study of Tibetan contemporary art and art in exile. But the film also unintentionally preserved something else. It preserved faces, streets, conversations, attitudes and emotions. It became a snapshot of Tibetan life in exile at a particular moment in our history.
That taught me something valuable: we don’t always know the historical value of what we are documenting while we are documenting it.
And recently, I experienced the opposite. We just finished principal filming for our feature film Floating Clouds by director Sonam Tseten yesterday. One of the central characters in the film is a Swiss-Tibetan adoptee who returns to Dharamshala searching for her birth family.
I worked on this story as a co-writer and producer and while developing the story, we began researching Tibetan children who were adopted abroad during the earlier decades of exile. We knew that a substantial number of these adoptions had taken place, but when we started looking for their stories, we found surprisingly little documentation.
Where are their voices? What were the circumstances in which these children were adopted? What did their Tibetan families experience? What was it like for these children to grow up in Switzerland, France, America or elsewhere? Did they come back? Did they search for their families? How did they understand their Tibetan identity?
Much of this history seems to survive through fragments and personal memories.
So these two films taught me two sides of the same lesson. Bringing Tibet Home taught me how something we document today can unexpectedly become an archive tomorrow. Floating Clouds taught me that when experiences are not documented, decades later it can become extremely difficult to reconstruct that history.
And this brings me to something I think about when I look at Tibetan journalism today. Our media understandably focuses a great deal on Tibet, politics, His Holiness, the Central Tibetan Administration, our Rinpoches, religious institutions and major events.
All of these are important. But sometimes I wonder whether we have become too accustomed to looking upward when we tell the Tibetan story. Perhaps we also need to look around us – at ordinary Tibetans.
What about the farmer, the teacher, the sweater seller, the shopkeeper, the nurse, the cook, the taxi driver, the mother raising children, or the elderly Tibetan living alone in a settlement? What did they experience? What did they sacrifice? What did they hope for? Their lives may never become headlines. But without their stories, our history is incomplete.
And this feels particularly important today because the Tibetan community is changing very quickly. The generation that first came from Tibet is passing away. Our refugee settlements are shrinking and changing. Young Tibetans are leaving India. Families are becoming scattered across continents. Our language is changing. Our relationships with religion, identity, marriage, work and community are changing. An entire generation is growing up with a very different understanding of what it means to be Tibetan.
So who is documenting all of this? What are the stories happening around us today that, fifty years from now, we may wish somebody had bothered to record? Perhaps because I have always felt that I work somewhat from the fringe, I find myself interested in stories that happen away from the centre. The centre is important. Our institutions are important. Our political and religious leaders are important. But a community is much bigger than its prominent figures.
Sometimes the most interesting changes are happening at the edges – among Tibetans who have left the settlements, young Tibetans growing up between cultures, artists and musicians, mixed families, adoptees, and people whose experiences don’t fit neatly into the stories we normally tell about ourselves.
The fringe is not separate from the Tibetan story. The fringe is often where the Tibetan story is changing first. And preserving these stories doesn’t always require a major documentary or a long investigation. Sometimes it can simply be a photograph and a conversation. A five-minute video. An oral-history interview. A journalist spending an afternoon with an elderly Tibetan in a settlement.
We can be asking simple questions like: How did you come here? Why did you stay? Why did you leave? What did you lose? What do you worry your children will forget? What does being Tibetan mean to you today?
Imagine if we had thousands of these conversations recorded from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Imagine what that archive would mean to us today. Not only interviews with important people, politicians and Rinpoches but the voices of ordinary Tibetans who built the exile community.
These small stories may seem insignificant when they happen but hundreds and thousands of small stories eventually become something much larger. They become the story of a people.
And this is perhaps the thought I would like to leave with Tibet Times on this anniversary. Fifty years from now, someone may look through the Tibet Times archive to understand what it was like to be Tibetan in 2026. They will probably know what our leaders said. They will know what resolutions were passed in our parliament. They will know what political debates we were having. But will they know what young Tibetans dreamed about and what music they listen to? Will they know what our grandparents worried about? What our parents sacrificed? What made us laugh? Why some of us stayed and why some of us left? How we raised our families? And what it actually felt like to be an ordinary Tibetan at this particular moment in our history?
So perhaps when we think about the future of Tibetan journalism, the question is not only: What news should we report tomorrow? But rather we should also ask: Whose stories are we preserving today? And perhaps most importantly: What will be remembered tomorrow?
Thank you.
