/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-NEPAL: Documentary Comes of Age

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Akhilesh Upadhyay

KATHMANDU, Sep 9 2003 (IPS) - Bright, genial, and intensely energetic, Narayan Wagle is one of Nepal’s most widely followed journalists, with a number of groundbreaking stories to his credit.

But more than his news, it is his simple village yarns, knit in self-effacing first-person narratives, that have captured the public imagination.

When he is not covering his daily staple of political stories for his Nepali-language newspaper ‘Kantipur’ in Kathmandu, the chances are Wagle is busy making a new friend along Nepal’s numerous trekking routes in the Himalayan foothills.

”To me,” he says with a broad grin, ”the fun begins, where the road ends.”

”Kathmandu suffocates me,” Wagle adds, charged after a 10-day trip to, and two front-page stories on, Tibet. ”Each time I walk up and down the mountains, it’s like walking with my father who used to hold my tiny finger as we walked for days to meet our relatives who couldn’t be reached by roads.”

”Travel is my first love,” says the 6’2” reporter. ”It’s a bonus if I come across some interesting discoveries along the way.”

Discoveries he has made aplenty over the years, many of which have helped him establish his reputation as a journalist bitten by the travel bug.

Now the man, who has made a career writing about others, finds himself as a character in a story.

‘Bhedako Oon Justo’, or ‘Like Lamb’s Wool’, a 67-minute documentary, is named after the song he first heard in a highland village north of Kathmandu. It is his deeply personal odyssey in search of the elusive tune.

For eight long years, Wagle would sing ‘Bhedako Oon Justo’ to his friends, and then singers and musicians, to check if they were familiar with the tune, but to no avail. Early this year, Wagle found the answer to his question.

For 10 days, members of a hugely popular musical group, Nepathya, travelled with Wagle to the highland village in Langtang Valley, alongside his friend and a part-time filmmaker Kiran Shrestha in search of the song.

”I had completely abandoned my camera for two years,” recalls Shrestha, ”and this was an opportunity for some candid camera works, totally unstructured. The wide recognition my work received has come as pleasant surprise.”

But Shrestha’s work is hardly the only personal documentary that has found recognition in Nepal’s quickly evolving cinema world. The personal documentary has solidly established itself as a new film genre in Nepal, say filmmakers.

The four-day Film South Asia 2003, which gets under way here on Sep. 25, will feature three Nepali documentaries, including Wagle’s odyssey – all deeply personal. Of the other two, one is about a university teacher and another of a musician who abandons the city life for village tranquility.

Perhaps South Asia’s only competitive documentary festival, Film South Asia (FSA) this month will feature 42 documentaries. With 29 entries, India has the largest pool, followed by Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan. Sri Lanka and Maldives have one each.

”Documentary as a genre has come of age in South Asia,” says Manesh Shrestha, director of FSA. ”Only a few years ago, we were struggling to get solid entries, and paying air fares to attract established names in cinema to the festival.”

No more. This year, there were more than 240 entries from all over the subcontinent and organisers are busy responding to inquiries for the biennial event all year-round.

While the FSA entries in the earlier years were donor-driven productions catering to the lucrative development market with a singular goal to highlight what a certain project had achieved, an increasing number of documentaries are free-wheeling artistic stuffs. They are pure fun and often made at a very low budget.

The new breed of creative cinema makers, most of them in their 30s and 40s, have chosen deeply personal and mundane stuffs, FSA’s Shrestha adds.

Take for example, ‘A Rough Cut in the Life and Times of Laxman Magar’, which received the second award at FSA 2001. Made at a cost of less than 50,000 rupees (670 U.S. dollars), it is about a young Nepali who joins the Indian Army but cannot return to his hill village upon retirement.

”It is fun to listen to Laxman as he narrates why he can’t return home,” says Wagle, an avid moviegoer himself. ”He works for a lodge and is now married to a low-caste woman. The film has no frills, no thrills. It is just a plain and simple personal story of an ordinary man.”

Not all the entries in Film South Asia 2003 fall into the ”personal” category though.

Most Indian entries, for example, have activist angle – opposition to and criticism of communal riots in Gujarat and sectarian violence in Kashmir are common subject matters.

”When you look beyond Nepal, perhaps the biggest achievement of Film South Asia has been the bridge it provides to communities who are divided by geography and politics,” says FSA’s Shrestha.

In 1997, for example, when Anand Patwardan’s ‘Father, Son, and Holy War’ was shown in the Pakistani city of Lahore by the travelling version of Film South Asia, many Pakistanis said it was the first Indian film to be publicly shown since in Pakistan since 1955.

Mark Tully, a renowned Indophile and a British Broadcasting Corp legend, heads a three-member FSA jury this month.