Dhondup Wangchen  Dhondup Wangchen (born 17 October 1974) is a Tibetan filmmaker imprisoned by the Chinese government in 2008 on charges related to his documentary "Leaving Fear Behind". Made with senior Tibetan monk Jigme Gyatso, the documentary consists of interviews with ordinary Tibetan people discussing the 14th Dalai Lama, the Chinese government, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and Han Chinese migrants to the region. After smuggling the tapes of the interviews out of Tibet, however, Dhondup Wangchen and Jigme Gyatso were detained during the 2008 Tibetan unrest. Dhondup Wangchen was sentenced to six years' imprisonment for subversion. Numerous international human rights organizations protested his detention, including Amnesty International, which named him a prisoner of conscience. In 2012, he was awarded the International Press Freedom Award of the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists. He served his full six-year sentence and was released from prison on 5 June 2014. In December 2017 Wangchen escaped from China to the United States, arriving in San Francisco on December 25, where his wife and children live, having been granted political asylum in the United States in 2012. Dhondup Wangchen was born in 1974, in Bayen in the Tsoshar region of Qinghai province China (formerly part of Amdo). His family were farmers. He later moved to the capital of Lhasa. There Dhondup Wangchen witnessed a pro-independence demonstration repressed by security authorities, an experience that a relative would later describe as critical to his "political awareness". In 1993, he and a cousin crossed the Himalayas into India to receive the blessing of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Dhondup returned to Tibet shortly after to act as an activist for the Tibetan cause. In 2006, Dhondup Wangchen and friend Jigme Gyatso, a senior Tibetan monk, conceived of a documentary interviewing ordinary Tibetan people on their views of the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government in the year leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The documentary was to be called "Leaving Fear Behind". The pair coordinated their efforts with a Dhondup Wangchen's cousin Gyaljong Tsetrin, who remained in Switzerland. In preparation for likely reprisals by the Chinese government, Dhondup Wangchen moved his wife, Llamo Tso, and their four children to Dharamsala, India. Between August 2007 to March 2008, Dhondup Wangchen and Jigme Gyatso gathered interviews from 108 Tibetan individuals discussing the political situation, all of whom agreed to have their faces shown on camera.