Tenzin Sonam and Ritu Sarin founded White Crane Films in London in 1990. They started the company while creating a documentary, The Reincarnation of Khensur Rinpoche, shot with 16mm. The film had a successful theatrical release and was subsequently broadcast in many countries throughout the world.

Soon after the completion of the film, Sonam and Sarin devoted themselves full time to filmmaking. They produced several documentaries including The Trials of Telo Rinpoche and The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet, which were both commissioned by the BBC.

In 1996, they decided to move temporarily to Dharamsala, India, to be closer to the exiled Tibetan community, a subject they planned to make a feature film about. That project, Dreaming Lhasa, is now complete.

Sonam was born in Darjeeling. He graduated from Delhi University and worked for a year for the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala. He then travelled for a few years in Switzerland, New York, Arizona and Los Angeles doing odd jobs before enrolling at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley, where he specialised in documentary filmmaking.

Sarin was born in New Delhi. She completed her schooling in London and her undergraduate studies at Delhi University. She moved to Brussels, where she worked for three years as a marketing representative at the Tea Board of India.

Having always had a passion for the cinema, Sarin then decided to study filmmaking and received an MFA in film and video from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

Sonam and Sarin worked on their first film together as a joint thesis project. The New Puritans: The Sikhs of Yuba City was completed in 1985 and won a number of awards in the United States. The film was broadcast nationally on PBS and the Learning Channel.

In 1987, they moved to London to work for the Meridian Trust, a film and video archive specialising in Buddhist and Tibetan related material. For three years they helped the Trust develop its archives of various trips made by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to different parts of the world.

Over the years, White Crane Films has produced, on a voluntary basis, a number of video programmes for the Tibetan government-in-exile and has advised it on media-related projects. Sonam and Sarin are also advisors to the Dharamsala-based Amnye Machen Institute's visual archives section, and Sonam is a member of the Institute's governing body.