A cup of home: Tenzin Tsasur’s award-winning short film Butter Tea brings Tibet to New York25/4/2026  Butter tea. The award-winning short film Butter Tea by Tenzin Tsasur, set in Ngatso Café in the New York borough of Queens, explores how Tibetan tea connects generations. Life | Human Intrest There’s a kind of longing you can’t quite pin down in English, no matter how hard you try. The Tibetan word ‘la’ points to the soul, something you carry with you, something that doesn’t stay behind. No matter how many thousands of miles separate a person from the land they once called home. That’s the feeling Tenzin Tsasur somehow distils into a single cup of butter tea. A café that feels like homeButter Tea, Tsasur’s quietly devastating short film, does not announce itself with grand gestures. And honestly, it doesn’t have to. Set almost entirely within the Ngatso Café in the New York borough of Queens, a real, living community hub tucked into one of the most culturally layered boroughs on earth, the film fixes its gaze on something small and ancient: the ritual of preparing and sharing traditional Tibetan butter tea. What grows out of that ritual is bigger than a story. It feels like a community refusing to let go. It’s hard to explain, but you recognise it straight away. Who is Tenzin Tsasur? Writer and director of Butter Tea, Tenzin Tsasur is a Tibetan filmmaker based in New York. His work focuses on identity, memory and the experience of Tibetans living outside their homeland. With Butter Tea, he brings a quiet, everyday moment into focus to explore connection across generations. The film leans heavily on two performers, Tenzin Phurpatsang and Dhamchoe, who between them carry the full weight of the immigrant experience without ever seeming to strain under it. Tsasur resists the temptation of heavy dialogue, trusting instead in the ambient warmth of the café, the slow curl of steam from a cup, the brief flickers of recognition that pass across a face when something tastes like memory. It’s confident filmmaking. The kind where silence actually does the talking. Nothing flashy. Nothing trying too hard. Just… there. Holding on, without saying it out loudStrip it back, and the film circles around one idea, even if it shows up in different ways: holding on. The elders in the Tibetan diaspora carry Tibet within them, its landscape, its language, its customs, in a way that no passport or policy can replicate. The younger generation, raised in the noise of Western life, risk losing fluency in that interior world not through indifference but simply through the relentless pace of living somewhere else. «You’ve probably known a place like that yourself.» The café slips into that in-between role people rely on without even noticing. Neither home nor workplace but the essential ground between, where culture is kept alive through habit, repetition and quiet care. You’ve probably known a place like that yourself. More than just a drinkMaking butter tea the centre of it all feels obvious the moment you see it. Po cha, as it is known, is not a casual drink. Brewed from black tea, yak butter and salt, it is an acquired taste for outsiders, earthy, savoury, unlike anything in the Western repertoire. For Tibetans, however, it is inseparable from hospitality, from altitude, from the texture of daily life on the plateau. To drink it in a café in Queens is, in some profound sense, to be in two places at once. Tsasur understands this without needing to explain it. «The smallest moments are the ones that land.» The film earned the Audience Award at the Tibet Film Festival Zurich 2025, a recognition that speaks not only to its craft but to its emotional honesty. Audiences are drawn to stories like this, stories rooted in lived experience, told with patience and trust. Right now, when bigger usually means louder and more expensive, Butter Tea offers a quiet counterpoint. The smallest moments are the ones that land. A cup, a glance, something familiar catching you off guard. Some things, it turns out, survive the journey. Hanan: text • 25 April 2026 You Might Like This Loved this one? Hanan picked a few more you might like. Your voice!
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