A group of teenagers educated in Nepal’s capital return to villages they left years earlier in this gently moving documentary
‘Is this my son?” Sixteen-year-old Jeewan’s mother doesn’t recognise him. The last time she saw his face he was six and being sent away to a charity-funded school in Kathmandu, like many other children from Nepal’s remote Himalayan villages. With this gently moving documentary, Zara Balfour and Marcus Stephenson follow three teenage pupils about to graduate as they go back home for the first time. For 17-year-old Nima, the final leg of the journey is a 15-day trek fraught with danger from avalanches: his village is in the highest inhabited region on Earth.
You can count the miles. But with enormous sensitivity the film observes the distance these bright, confident city kids have travelled from poverty. Jeewan, in tight jeans and with a Justin Bieber haircut, can’t imagine life without WhatsApp. In his grandmother’s village, the nearest telephone is a five-hour walk and it’s so cold his cousin has a bath just once a month. Back home with his mum, Jeewan offers to carry a basket of logs she’s lugging up a hill. But it’s so heavy he can’t lift it.
Written by Cath Clarke
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/14/children-of-the-snow-land-review-nepal under the title “Children of the Snow Land review – city kids trek home to remote lives”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
