Final Project

Partner: Joseph Strong

Dolma- Audio project with Kevin Sookdeo

What I Hear

Sunday late morning, from getting brunch to running errands all over the neighborhood, I realized how diverse my neighborhood is in sound. Walking to the café, I can hear the noisy and excruciating train coming to a stop at my station overhead. I can hear the train approaching from far but when it starts to slow down, the screeching noise drills through my ears, making me regret taking the shortcut for that few seconds. Without looking up I can tell when the train is pulling out of the station because it makes this sound like a big industrial fan starting to spin. On the ground, impatient drivers start honking at the first sight of green light. The typical car with all windows down with deafening loud music coming out of raspy speakers passes by, tickling my feet to start dancing. Usually I would never dance in the middle of the street but this car was playing EDM music instead of the regular R&B. What beat that car that day was the out of place three Harley Davidson riders in my hipster neighborhood. What I don’t understand is how they can make such a loud noise, yet it looks like they haven’t traveled that far for that amount of loudness. I am used to the sound of Royal Enfield bullets, they sound like loud fart noise but those Harley Davidson bikes are like super amplified and annoying bullet sound. When the bikers turned to long straight, almost empty, street, they tapped down to first or second gear with his toes to speed through the street. The hyped fart sound became crisp and consistent, making me think about how clean the silencer must be to deliver that kind of sharp blast, something bike enthusiasts would consider beautiful.  

Project 1: Define A Space

Trash ("Define A Space" MEDP 160 Project by Tsering Dolma, Auel Kanaybekov, and Kevin Sookdeo) from Auel Kanaybekov on Vimeo.

Artist Statement

I was born as a Tibetan refugee in a large Tibetan resettlement camp in South India. My life has been a fusion of Tibetan culture and tradition with spice of Indian culture and lifestyle. I grew up watching Bollywood movies and Hindi soap operas, which is where my curiosity and passion for film flourished. Bollywood's festive, colorful, and musical films have this power to inspire and impact the whole country unlike any Hollywood movies. Being a refugee, naturally I want to spread the word about my country's struggle for freedom through film. I love documentaries however; I believe documentaries aren’t the only way to spread the word about Tibet. In my senior year of high school, while doing a research, I discovered that Mao Zedong’s Wikipedia page doesn’t contain anything about Mao invading Tibet. So I took it upon myself to write up a section about Mao and Tibet, which turned out to be a difficult task, for almost three years now, the section is still up on his page. That little achievement of mine drives me to spread the word about my freedom struggle. I want to make movies with the style of Anurag Basu's "Barfi" style scenic shots, South Indian movie style drama, and the story of my people with romance like Nicholas Sparks novels. Just because my freedom struggle is a terrible reality doesn’t mean it should be told in a depressing documentary style. I want my audience to feel the helplessness millions of Tibetans feel, yet experience the safe haven we have found in India, our second home.