"The Escape" accepted to the Berlinale's Talent Campus, 2007

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 Army, retaliated by imprisoning and torturing teachers suspected of sympathizing with Maoists. Security forces fired on school-grounds as rebels held meetings.

Schoolteachers, caught in-between the conflict, migrated to Kathmandu and other cities between 1996-2006. Unable to find work, they live in dire poverty.

This short is based on an incident told by a schoolteacher from Mugu, Western Nepal, to the filmmaker in a camp for internally displaced refugees in Kohalpur, Southern Nepal. The teacher now lives a life as a displaced internal refugee in Nepalgunj.

This short is a fictional, dramatic, and poetic film. It aims to remind us what occured during Nepal's civil conflict, and to catch some of the subjective nature of experience.

(PS: This short was shot in film school in Paris on no-budget with volunteer actors of many nationalities. The main actor was quite upset at the director because she made him bring the props--including the old t-shirt and white flour with which we covered him in the last few scenes. The actor playing the Maoist got lost because she was new to Paris and almost was a no-show because she was waiting in the wrong station! Please don't expect perfection. This is a student film.)

Supportive Men: the documentary

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...

WATER shown in eco-feminism week in Trinity College, Dublin

Isabel Jorgensen invited me to screen WATER at the eco-feminism week (Nov 13-17, 2017) at Trinity College, Dublin. She said she'd seen me present at Oxford University's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and thought the film fitted perfectly with the theme of the week. I was already back in Nepal after a summer in Oxford, so I suggested that she present it instead. Isabel said the documentary would be screened at the Museum Building Library, and that "it was by far the most beautiful building and room on campus!" So I googled it up, and indeed, here is the beautiful building . It was inspired by the Byzantine architecture of Venice. Here is her email after the event, after I asked her how it went: Amazing, thanks! Here are some pictures from the event, it went smoothly and there was a lot of good discussion. I gave a 30 minute intro to climate justice and environmental issues and women’s roles in their resolution, we had the a screening an...

Hubert Bals Fund grant

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.

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