New heights for Nepal film festival

One of the prize winners, “Karma”.

A tree is toppled. A missile is fired. A mountaineer makes a dangerous ascent. A Buddhist nun waves her scarf exuberantly in the wind; mountain animals stare at the camera; there are images of violence, weeping and laughter.
The signature "jingle" to the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival (KIMFF) shows that it is not only about the genre of "mountain film."
In this, the only mountain film festival east of Suez and the only one in a developing country, mountains are central to some of the 66 movies and loosely connected with others. Nearly all, however, are linked to mountain countries and 18 nations are represented.
The festival, now eight years old, has just been playing to big audiences in the Nepalese capital.
"What we really want to do is also inform, educate, make the Nepali public aware about issues around the world and in Nepal and how it affects them here," festival director Ramyata Limbu told the BBC.
"It could be about global warming, about tourism, economic resources, how people in mountains use them."
Nepal itself provided 18 of the films, including the one selected for the festival opening -- a new short feature called "Threshold."
It describes the encounter between two women from opposite ends of Nepal's complex society: Saraswati, from the socially ultra-conservative lowlands and Trishna, from Kathmandu and educated. They meet for a day as Trishna, a census worker, visits Saraswati's home.
The filmmaker, Deepak Rauniyar, says Saraswati is like a typical woman in traditional lowland society.
"Inside the threshold, inside the house, there is no meaning for her. She won't count herself as a member of the family. She says: 'I'm not a family member, I can't talk'."
There is a real buzz about the annual festival, whose audience is mainly young and Nepali. The crowds are biggest for the local films but many international ones are also showcased.
"The Day After Peace," is the remarkable story of how an annual international peace day, September 21, gained UN recognition thanks to a British filmmaker and campaigner, Jeremy Gilley.
The film is one of several in a special section on human rights, two of which deal with Nepal's civil war, which ended only two years ago, and the suffering it continues to inflict.
Suma Josson's "I Want My Father Back," looks at suicides among cotton farmers in central India faced with falling prices for their crop and rising input costs as biotechnology companies enter the sector.
"It's really moving and amazing stuff," says Nepalese filmmaker and critic Diwas KC of this movie.
"What the film has really succeeded in showing is the kind of knowledge that the farmers have… more so than the companies that dominate their profession."
Mountains themselves provide a spectacular backdrop for many of the films from places including Montenegro, Croatia, Germany, Lapland, Switzerland and Canada.
Ramyata Limbu says films from other mountain communities can be revealing for the Nepalese audience -- covering themes such as changing lifestyles or the demise of shepherding.
There are also two notable Himalayan films from the Nepali director Tsering Rhitar Sherpa. In "Karma," the nuns of a remote nunnery face a dilemma when the venerable abbess dies.
Special prayers and expensive ceremonies are needed to ensure her proper reincarnation. So they want to get back a large sum the nunnery has lent to a mysterious businessman, Tashi.
For a poor country, Nepal has a lot of filmmaking going on, much of which inspires Diwas KC.
He highlights "Changa," by Pooja Gurung, which is about a young child who wants to fly a kite; and "Sindhu Pokhrel's Palash," in which an actor severely disabled with cerebral palsy plays a man watching young women from his city-centre window.
"This exploration of the sexuality of the disabled person is just amazingly done and is something that you don't usually see being undertaken," explains Diwas.
He feels that Nepal's big political change two years ago, when massive street demonstrations heralded the demise of the monarchy, created ferment in filmmaking.
"People went out and recorded stuff. And since then people have been coming out with independent work in a fashion that has never happened before," he says.
KIMFF has now become a competitive festival, and 20 of the films were judged by a three-member jury from Nepal, Australia and India.
The first three prizes went to "I Want My Father Back," "The Day After Peace" and "Threshold."
The festival, it seems, is going from strength to strength.