I received a seed grant from the Hubert Bals Fund to write a fiction film script in 1997.  The grant gave me support and inspiration when I needed it the most. I found  this list of HBF grantees  on the web, and am honored to be part of this global film community.

Students at the University of Washington Bothell just discussed my documentary "Burma on My Mind" and fiction short "The Escape" as part of their assignment. The student making the request to screen the documentary says: "This is the last assignment in my BISS 466 "Human Rights and Resistance" class (focus on social topics in South Asia). A presentation is about " a South Asian film director who engages with issues of gender and human rights in South Asia or within its diaspora". My group chose you as a film director that we want to research on. Thanks so much for your help." 

Here's the link to PANI (Water), my 2000 documentary, now on Youtube. I was fresh out of Brown University and influenced by Trinh T. Minh-ha when I shot this film. I was interested in contradictions and ambiguity. I was interested in incoherence, and what it may tell us about "community" and "participation."                                                            *** I apologize for the quality of the video. My Beta master copy vanished in-between moves to two continents. This  is digitized from a VHS copy held at Stanford Library. Thank you, library and librarians!

I showed "Supportive Men" at the Alliance Francaise de Kathmandu on March 9th, 2015, for Women's Day. The students were very enthusiastic to see it and there were lots of questions about it. I got the feeling that urban students would really benefit from implementing the gender equality training as well as trainings for men in cooking and housework in their curriculum! AFK's website: http://www.alliancefrancaise.org.np/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/afktm/

Handigaon is the oldest inhabited settlement of the Kathmandu Valley. A jatra is a festival involving music, devotional worship, agricultural rituals, and alcohol. "There are no jatras like those of Handigaon," is a saying that has become synonymous with the excessive celebratory rites and rituals associated with this neighborhood. Throughout the year, I can hear beautiful traditional music being played at night as people go about the festivities, and on a full moon night in autumn this sound can be especially soulful and evocative. Here's one of those, which I shot in my neighborhood with my small digital camera. This photoshow attempts to capture the mixture of mystery and mundaneness of the festivals. With apologies for not including the original music, which I shall do very shortly, as soon as I get hold of some good sound recording equipment...

In Nepal, men and women are involved in various ways to shift norms and relationships toward gender equality. This documentary focuses on one community in Kapilvastu, Southern Nepal, to show how men and couples are changing the way they interact with one another to bring about social change, and also how men are supporting women’s movement for empowerment and gender equality.   _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Mr. Dube is a young man in his late twenties who lives in Kapilvastu, Nepal. He has taken part in a gender equality training given by a local NGO, in partnership with an INGO. He is married and has two sons. In his small community, Mr. Dube has become an inspirational figure who has managed to change the behavior of not just the younger men, but also the older men of his community, who now cook, help with housework and childcare, and support  their spouses in a way that was unthinkable even a few ye