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...

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...

Water for the Ages is an interesting clearinghouse website for water and sanitation related issues. It includes films, books, art, organizations and a water related calendar. It has a thoughtful collection of water films listed at its film page. My film PANI is listed along with 50 others--the films include both longform documentary as well as short films. You can find the film page here : http://waterfortheages.org/water-films/

I was a participant at the Berlinale Talent Campus, which is part of the Berlinale cinema festival, in 2007. That program has now been re-named "Berlinale Talents."  During the festival and campus, I met many filmmakers from all over the world. I also got to see talks by prominent actors, filmmakers and composers like Wim Wenders, Gael Garcia Bernal, Walter Salles, and Jan Kaczmarek . The program is open to filmmakers from all over the world. If you would like to apply and attend with your film for 2015, click on the bear below! The call for applications for 2014 is already closed, but you can still browse the website and put a note in your calender to check back when the applications re-open.

"Burma on My Mind" screened on Sunday 23rd June to a packed audience at the beautiful Image Ark Gallery, which is located in a historic part of Patan. The gallery is owned and managed by Mary-Ange, a longterm resident of Kathmandu. Here is their Facebook page . Page of event.

The ever dynamic Manju Mishra, founder of a journalism college in Nepal, co-ordinates a Nepal-Africa film festival . "Burma on My Mind" was shown during the 3rd festival on June 2013. Rajesh Hamal was a guest speaker at the inauguration! During which he made a wonderfully thoughtful and articulate speech about Nepal's connection with Africa. For a listing of films, check this page: http://www.nepalafricafilmfestival.com.np/archives/2013.html  

“Burma on My Mind” is a journey and pilgrimage through the heart of Myanmar’s Gorkhali community. How do Hindus and Buddhists co-exist and live in present day Myanmar? Where do they go to seek spiritual transcendence? What conflicts arise in their search for religious identity? And how can the words of the Buddha provide an answer, and a pathway to peace, to the faultlines that have sprung up in this tight-knit community? The documentary is available in its full length form on Youtube. Your feedback is highly appreciated! If you'd like to use the documentary for teaching purposes, please drop me an email at sansarmagazine@gmail.com. Click here to see "Burma on My Mind"  on Youtube. The documentary has been viewed by an audience of 37,000. __________________________________________________________________ I presented the article associated with this documentary "The Religious Life of the Gorkhalis of Myanmar" at the conference on religion and...

I spent a year between 2010-2011 shooting a documentary about the Gorkhali diaspora in Myanmar and Thailand. The documentary looks at a diasporic community deeply entrenched in Burma, both through their history as well as their love for the country. It also features the rising tensions between newly converted Gorkhali Theravada practitioners who are pressuring Hindus and Mahayani Buddhists to convert to the state-sanctioned religion. The movement appears more political than religious, and it is also new. Religion was one domain that was untouched by the state from the Sixties till very recently, allowing people to continue to worship in their own manner, undisturbed. Burma's rising intolerance regarding religious freedom is disturbing from many vantage points,  not the least of which is that the teachings of the Buddha always regards non-violence (ahimsa) as its central tenet. Pressurizing those from other sects or religions to adopt the state religion goes against everything...

This is a photographic record of the 90th birthday party of a man in my neighborhood. This celebration is known as a "jankhu" by the Newari community. The photographs remind us of the joyful and celebratory aspects of aging.

Here is a tiny "film" made with cellphone shots I took of the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok. I wanted to work with the limitations of technology, and see what could be done with something as small, mobile and universal as a cellphone.

  HOME         REGULAR        COLUMNS        POLL        PHOTOS        ARCHIVE        VACANCIES       BLOGS LIFE TIMES About town  Events and eateries in town  FROM ISSUE #525 (29 OCT 2010 - 04 NOV 2010) |  TABLE OF CONTENTS   SUBSCRIBE NT     PRINT    REFER     WRITE TO EDITOR Share 1 EVENTS The Seven Henry Series: In Search of an Ideal Landscape , an exhibition of supracollages by the acclaimed Indic artist Syyed Iqbal Geoffrey.  Starts 28 October, 5.30pm, till 17 November, Siddhartha Art Gallery, Babar Mahal Revisited, Gallery hours: 11am to 6pm, 12pm to 4pm on Saturdays, 4218048 Planet Nepal Contemporary Art Exhibition , installation art and exhibition by various artists.  2 November-...

Gai Jatra, or "Cow Carnival," is a festival that takes place in Kathmandu every monsoon. The story goes like this: A queen loses her beloved child and falls into a depression. Her husband takes the help of a holy man, who promises her that if she can get a sesame seed from the home where there's never been a death, the child can be brought back to life. The procession goes through all the homes where there's been a death that year. The queen finally comes out of her grief when she realizes death is inevitable. Gai Jatra is also characterized by satire of governments and people in high places.  Sushma Joshi took these photos in 2010. These photos show a very small slice of what was going on in Kathmandu on that day. Enjoy!

A Nepali Émigré in Paris and Water were shown at the 3rd Annual Nepali Film Festival in Vancouver. A Nepali Emigre in Paris (2006, 4 min.) Director: Sushma Joshi A Nepali man flees political repression in Nepal in the late 1980s as the fight for democracy begins. After living in Paris for 20 years, he has had no reason to look back - until now, when both his loyalty and his love are torn between two sides. You can see the film on Utube here, by clicking on this link.

We deliberated for about 16 hours and watched 124 shorts before coming up with these results... The film competition was sponsored by DFID and the British Council. _________________________________________ Out of the 126 entries that were received, the following films have been declared winners by the three member jury which consisted of Dr. Tirtha Bahadur Shrestha (writer and conservationist), Sushma Joshi (writer and filmmaker) and Kesang Tseten (writer and filmmaker). Winning Short Films Director(s) Position Act Locally Think Globally Santoshi Nepal and Ishu Lama Winner Jeopardy Shiva Sharan Koirala 1st Runner Up 3 Cs of Climate Change Binod Kr. Dhami and Padam Raj Paneru 2nd Second Runner Up Get Your Act Together Suresh Limbu Special Mention

29 AUGUST, 2009 SHOOTING CLIMATE CHANGE SUSHMA JOSHI When Basanta Thapa of the Himal Association called me up and asked me if I’d like to be one of the jury members of the UK Nepal Climate Change Competition, it sounded easy. “We’ve received three films,” he said. “About seven have registered to send more.” We estimated at the most about two dozen films, each three minutes long, that we’d watch in one sitting. When I rushed in at 9:15am at the judging venue, and said: “I hear we now have 70 submissions!”, Basanta Dai said to me: “Its now 124!” The numbers were incredible, if only because a few years ago one could count the number of filmmakers on the fingers of two hands. As we sat down to watch the first film, I got a tingle in my scalp from the excitement. There were 124 filmmakers in Nepal who were not just interested in climate change issues but who had actually gotten it together to submit films? This, indeed, ws good news for Nepal. This explosion of filmmaking had co...