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. The pair gathered 40 hours of interview footage shot by a single camera. They had completed filming and just smuggled the tapes out of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, when riots erupted and began to spread through Tibetan-majority areas of China. As part of the government response that followed, both Jigme Gyatso and Dhondup Wangchen were detained on 28 March in Tong De, Qinghai Province.