4 pm, Rashtriya Sabha Griha (City Hall)
Bahadur: The Accidental Brave
54 min, India 2011
Direction: Aditya Seth
With an open border between India and Nepal, labor migration to India is an important economic resource for many Nepalis. Mumbai is a much favored destination for them. Nearly all Nepali migrant workers are susceptible to high-risk sexual behavior and they end up contracting HIV. Once they return home, they infect their spouses as well.[break]
The Far West Nepal is now facing an HIV/AIDS epidemic. Bahadur (The Accidental Brave) puts forth this phenomenon in a sociopolitical perspective.
5:30 pm, Rashtriya Sabha Griha (City Hall)
Khyi Rgan (Old Dog)
88 min, China 2011
Direction: Pema Tseden
At the end of the 20th century in Tibet, a boy sells his family mastiff to a dog dealer in town but his father retrieves the dog and frees it into a mountain. However, the freed mastiff ends up in the hands of the dog dealer again. It is up for sale again. To get the mastiff back again from the dealer, the boy gets into a fight with the dealer and ends up in prison. This forces the father to make some difficult decisions regarding a dog that has been his friend for years.
Saturday, December 8
11 am, Rashtriya Sabha Griha (City Hall)
Khatti Suun
22 min, Nepal 2012
Direction: Laalu Bohara and Meena Pariyar
The short film is a story of Nabina BK and Kopila Sunar, two exceptional women with a desire to get educated in the most adverse situation. They are both Dalits and live in remote villages in the mid-western region of Nepal.
12:30 pm, Nepal Tourism Board Auditorium
Vietnamese Girl
86 min, USA/Vietnam 2011
Direction: Tara Milutis
During a six-month period of living and traveling throughout Vietnam, an American filmmaker meets a diverse group of Vietnamese women and documents their attempted integration into the new global culture. From a group of Hmong hill tribe girls struggling to create new identities, now that tourism and media have forever changed their lives, to a divorcée from Hanoi and her transformation into globetrotting backpacker, Vietnamese Girl documents the growing pains at the dawn of a new feminism in Asia.
4 pm, Nepal Tourism Board Auditorium
Freundschaft Auf Zeit (Friendship with Limits)
52 min, Pakistan/ Austria/ Germany 2012
Direction: August Pflugfelder
What makes a friendship fall to pieces? Two extreme mountain climbers are closely bound by their common ambition to climb the highest peak in the world in record time. Their joint ascent to the summit of Broad Peak in Pakistan requires mutual trust to be able to unconditionally rely on each other, and pushes them to their physical and mental limits. But was it actually a common goal, or did their goal become the reason for competition against each other?
5pm, Rashtriya Sabha Griha (City Hall)
Who will be a Gurkha?
75 min, Nepal/Finland/UK/Norway 2012
Direction: Kesang Tseten
The Gurkhas began soldiering for the British colony in India 200 years ago, following a war in which the two were enemies. Impressed with the fighting prowess of the khukuri-wielding Nepalis, who seemed not to fear death, Britain began recruiting them. Since then, Gurkhas have been deployed from Borneo, Burma and Africa, to France, Italy, the Falklands and, more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today’s potential recruits are not rustic hill boys, considered the right ‘martial’ material, but urban-based Nepalis with a school or higher education, attracted by wages equaling British soldiers now, and drawn by the myth and glamour, as well as the adventure and danger, associated with the Gurkhas, in spite of the very real prospect of dying in the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.
SUNDAY, December 9
11 pm, Rashtriya Sabha Griha (City Hall)
A L’ecole Des Bambous (Bamboo Schools)
52 min, France 2011
Direction: Jean Pierre Devorsine
Uttam Sanjel, a young artiste honed by the rigors of Bollywood, had a dream: providing education for all of Nepal’s poor children! The film combines a slice of his unrelenting activity with the self-portraits of three young pupils who have taken up the camera to film their own lives. This multifaceted account takes us to the heart of the struggle for education of a man with unflagging determination and children desperate for knowledge.
1 pm, Rashtriya Sabha Griha (City Hall)
Hari
11 mi/46 sec, Nepal 2012
Direction: Asim Chitrakar
Being kind, generous, helpful, honest and truthful is what Hari has learnt from his parents. However, the world he lives in is just the opposite. He struggles to find his place in the college where none of his ethics works. Confused and dazzled, he eventually decides to change. He decides to become as corrupted as the world surrounding him, but the situation gets even worse from then on.
Rizwan (Guardian of Paradise)
16 min, India 2012
Direction: Deepti Khuranja
When Rizwan tries to live up to his name, which means ‘the guardian of paradise,’ he is detained and tortured by the army. His house is taken over, and his innocence questioned. The story that unfolds raises many questions. Whose paradise is this? Who is Rizwan? A murderer or an innocent child obeying his father? Based on Agha Sahid Ali’s collection of poems, “The Country without a post office,” the film is a story of human tragedy set in Kashmir. A story told, not in life, but in death.
MONDAY, December 10
10:30 am, Nepal Tourism Board Auditorium
Tales from a Place less Traveled: Azamgarh
52 min, India 2012
Direction: Shakeb Ahmed
Delhi, India, September 2008 – Two young boys from Azamgarh, a small sleepy district of Uttar Pradesh in India, get killed in a police encounter on grounds of being alleged terrorists. A wave of arrests of young Muslim migrant men follows. Corporate media rushes in and the police makes some enthusiastic claims. Eventually, the only picture allowed to stick in popular Indian imagination is of Azamgarh as Aatankgarh: a Nursery of Terror.
Caught in the crosshairs of a war against terror, a politics of fear and prejudice, a convulsion of increasingly polarized identities, Azamgarh is a tarnished town today. Azamgarh, the locals here insist, is many more things than a dangerous breeding ground of deranged terrorists.
2:15 pm, Nepal Tourism Board Auditorium
Qui A Tue Natacha? (Who killed Natacha?)
64 min, France 2011
Direction: Mylène Sauloy
Chechnya, July 2009 – Natacha Estemirova is abducted and killed. Natacha, journalist and human rights defender with the Memorial Association, had succeeded her Russian journalist friend, Ana Politkovskaya, murdered three years ago.
Both had long been receiving threats from the Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov whom Putin had named President of Chechnya.
The movie is an investigation in Chechnya, Russia and England on the system set up by Putin to stifle any dissident voices and which has already cost the lives of 25 reporters. It also reveals the courage of an exceptional woman.
TUESDAY, December 11
3 pm, Nepal Tourism Board Auditorium
Oci in Usesa Boga – Videonadzor Sudana (Eyes and Ears of God – Video Surveillance of Sudan)
95 min, Slovenia 2012
Direction: Tomo Kriznar and Maja Weiss
It is an eyewitness account by the publicist and activist Tomo Kriznar from 1979 to 2012 of the secret extermination of African natives in areas of Sudan that are rich in natural resources: The Nuba Mountains, Darfur, Abyei and Blue Nile.
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