Honors Student to Present Video on Study Abroad in India

Photo Submitted

Bryan Campbell filming in India. Photo by Celi Birke.

It took Honors College student Bryan Campbell nine months to distill 44 hours of video footage into a 30-minute film that documents University of Arkansas students’ encounter with India and the Tibetans who live there in exile. Campbell will present his video for the first time at 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 1, in Giffels Auditorium.

Abroad Horizon follows two Honors College students, Celi Birke and Bobby Howard, who traveled to Dharamsala, India, last summer to meet Tibetans in exile and document their stories. This opportunity came through the TEXT Program (Tibetans in Exile Today), an oral history project led by Sidney Burris, director of the Fulbright College Honors Program and professor of English, and Geshe Thupten Dorjee, a humanities instructor in Fulbright College.  

“The trip was about the Tibetans’ struggle, but I wanted to capture the students’ experience,” Campbell said. “Really, what I wanted to see was how the students were changed by the experience.”

Campbell chronicled every aspect of the trip, from the students’ excitement in videotaping Tibetan leader Tenzin Tsundue to dorm room pranks. Campbell was rarely without his video camera during the three-week trip.

“You shoot as much as you can, and then you refine. It was impossible to plan ahead; I always had to be on my toes,” he said.

Campbell is pursuing a broadcast major and history minor in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. He works for UA Productions, where he has created several videos, but says this is his most ambitious effort to date.

“I’ve worked on this since August, but haven’t kept a sequence made before last December,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot.”

Campbell received an Honors College Study Abroad Grant in support of his trip to India.