Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is an Indian filmmaker, director, and producer. She is from Dharmshala, India. She was born in New Delhi. She completed her School studies at Miranda House College for girls at Delhi University. After that, she did MFA in film and Video from California College of the Arts in Oakland. She got married to Tenzing Sonam, who is also a Film Director and writer. They first met as students at Delhi University, and in the 1980s, they met again in the San Francisco Bay area at the University of California in Berkeley. In 1985 they worked together on their first film as a thesis project, “The New Puritans: The Sikh of Yuba City,” the film was broadcast on National PBS.

Ritu Sarin and Tenzin Sonam went to London in 1987 and worked as a program directors at the Meridian Trust, a Buddhist and Tibet- related film archived and production company. As a part of their job, they documented Dalai Lama’s Historical trips, Nobel peace prize visits to Norway, and his First Trip to the Russian Buddhist Republics of Kalmykia and Buryatia. In 1991 they started their own independent film Company, “White Crane Films.” They Made their first documentary, “The Reincarnation of Khensur Rinpoche,” under the banner of White Crane Films. The film got successfully released in theatre and broadcast in the USA, Australia, Germany, and Switzerland.

In 1992 “Tibet” got released, in which they got involved in a personal, political, and artistic way. In 1993 “The Trials of Telo Rinpoche” got released. In 1996 they left London and got settled in Dharamshala, India, and made several films such as Fish Tales in 1997, A Stranger In My Native Land (1997), The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet (1998), Big Treasure Chest for the Future Children: Tibet (1999), Dreaming Lhasa (2005) which has its world Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festivals and in 2007, Thread of Karma and The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom got released, which won the Vaclav Havel Award in 2009.

In 2012 they founded “The Dharmshala International Film Festivals” to promote Cinema, arts, and independent media in the Himalayan region and released the film “when Hari Got Married.” In 2018 “The Sweet Requiem” was released and had a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Apart from that, she is also an artist and worked on several art projects.