Filmmakers
Tashi Dhondup
Tashi Dhondup was born in Sikkim, India. He went to school in Gangtok and the Tibetan Children's Village in Dharamsala. He completed his bachelor's degree in English literature at the University of Delhi. In 2001, he was selected for the Fulbright scholarship in the US and earned his master's degree in broadcast journalism and documentary filmmaking at the University of Colorado at Boulder, US. He then did an internship for a year at the Army Armstrong Films in Colorado.
Prior to his departure for the US, Dhondup worked as a teacher at the Tibetan Children's Villsage in Dharamsala. He also worked as an assistant-to-editor at the Tibetan Review.
Dhondup made his first film Earth Sense as part of his internship project. It is a 20-minute documentary film on summer camps for children with learning difficulties. The camps, organised by a group of volunteer occupation therapists, are designed to address the needs of children by connecting them with the natural world. The group of occupational therapists, led by Lois Hickman of Colorado, have been organising summer camps for the last several years.
The film was shot at the therapy settings in Colorado and Japan and takes the viewers through various nature-based therapy activities and accesses their impact on the participating children.