PANI is showing at the Himalayan Film Festival in School of Oriental and African Studies, London on October 13. Please go if you can! www.himalayanfilmfestival.co.uk/ Saturday Films (13th Oct) The Living of Jogimara 7pm A film about 17 young men from Jogimara village in Dhading district who were killed by security forces while they were building an airport in Kalikot. [Dir. Mohan Mainali, 38mins] The Living of Jogimara - The Wait Continues 7:50pm This is the follow up to the first film to bring us up to date with what has happened in the same small village in Dhading. [Dir. Mohan Mainali, 14mins] Operation free voice 8:10pm Hasta Gurung’s documentary is a chronology of the crackdown on the media after the February 2005 military coup by the king. Overnight, newsrooms were turned into barracks, there was direct censorship and FM stations were not allowed to broadcast news. Operation Free Voice documents the stories of the journalists in the frontlines, how they struggled to uphold their ...

Water scarcity and water management become big issues as the globe warms up and we edge closer to the 11th hour. A while back, I had the good fortune to accompany a few friends to see the Raj Kulo, a mediaval water system that brought water to the Kathmandu Valley. Astonishingly, the Raj Kulo still works where people haven't dug it up or sunk concrete foundations into the water sources. The "hiti" (Newari water spouts made of stone) of Patan and Bhaktapur are fed through this elaborate system in which the water is brought through canals all the way from Tika Bhairav. Knowing the meddlesome (and stupid) nature of modern people, the ancients devised a tantric secrecy around their water system. The tantric priests were the only ones who knew when the water sources were located, perhaps as a way to counteract acts of sabotage from warring neighbours. The water was piped in through an elaborate filtration system so good people still go to drink water from one particular spout ...

THE ESCAPE (2006) DIRECTOR: SUSHMA JOSHI 9 MINS, 16MM, BLACK AND WHITE PRODUCED AT THE NEW YORK FILM ACADEMY, LA FEMIS, PARIS, FRANCE Accepted to the Berlinale Film Festival's Talent Campus in 2007 A squad of young Maoists come to execute a teacher, who escapes and runs through the jungle for two days to reach help. A civil conflict raged in Nepal from 1996-2006. Education was severely affected. The Maoists, leading a People's War, killed schoolteachers and forced them to leave the villages for supporting political parties, teaching Sanskrit, or for suspected spying. Amnesty Internationa recorded cases of schoolteachers executed by the guerillas. Maoists pressured teachers to teach the Maoist curriculum, and to contribute half of their salary to the People’s War. The rebels held indoctrination meetings in schools. They abducted schoolchildren for periods of time, and pressured them to join the movement. The state security forces, including police and the Royal Nepal...

Here is my profile page in the Berlinale Talents website. With my supercool buzzcut and red manic-panic hair dye, circa 1992!

I shot "The Escape" in 2006, as a student at the New York Film Academy in Paris. The six week course taught us how to direct good films. This film features actors who are not Nepali--because all the Nepalis I knew where working, or  unable to take a day off to shoot a student film. I am grateful to the actors of different nationalities who did show up to be in my low-budget production! I hope viewers will see this film for what it is: a homage to cinema, and a homage to the people who suffered through, and survived, the civil conflict in Nepal. The film is inspired by a story told to me by a schoolteacher from Mugu, who was living in an internally displaced camp in Kohalpur, Nepalgunj, in 2004. I visited the camp as part of a team of researchers hired by UNDP to find out about the state of justice during the conflict. Feeling like INGO reports often did not do justice to people's stories, I was compelled to shoot this film two years afterwards. I hope ...

This short film portrays a Nepali artist who flees the repression of the Panchayat system, and ends up at the Ecole Des Beaux Artes in Paris. It is now 20 years later, and he is waiting at the gate for his daughter, who has been accepted to the very same university, where he has also met his French wife. The marriage however, is falling apart, but he doesn't know this yet. As his daughter walks off with a friend, he looks and sees his wife kissing her lover. This is the first time he's met the lover, who's ten years younger. He realizes the marriage is over. He thinks back to the phonecall his first wife has made him from Nepal--telling him is daughter from the first marriage has been jailed for joining the Maoist Movement in Nepal. He realizes he has to make a choice. Will he stay in Paris, where he's spent the majority of his adult life, or will he return to Nepal?

In the summer of 2006, I attended the New York Film Academy's directing program in Paris. NYFA's program is based in La Femis, one of Paris's premier film institute. These are the 16mm shorts I shot: The Escape (2006) 9 minutes, fiction 16mm, black and white A schoolteacher from Mugu, Western Nepal, flees a troop of young Maoist cadres who come to kill him. Based on a true story told to the filmmaker by a teacher in an internally displaced camp in Kohalpur. A Nepali Emigre in Paris (2006) 4 minutes, fiction 16mm, black and white A Nepali man flees political repression and leaves for Paris as the fight for democracy begins. He has no reason to look back for twenty years—till now, when both his loyalty and his love are torn between two sides. Suzanne (2006) 4 minutes, fiction 16mm, black and white An homage to Leonard Cohen’s song.