‘Kalo Pothi’ movie review: A triumph of Nepali cinem

After watching Min Bahadur Bham’s much-acclaimed Kalo Pothi, where two friends growing up in Mugu during the decade-long civil war set out on a journey to bring back a missing hen, I couldn’t help but reflect on how far Nepali cinema has come in the recent years. After all, just a little context is needed to appreciate Kalo Pothi, which combines an erudite understanding of the craft of cinema, with the deftness of a well-woven narrative and then elevates it with a degree of personal involvement. All this evoked in me, memories of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, no less. Our films have been recognised by various film festivals around the world for quite some time now. Most recently, the Bhaskar Dhungana-directed Suntali successfully combined the conceit of a telenovela with a tale of a village girl that was distinctly Nepali. True to its form, Suntali combined these two to a certain degree of success. But the audience couldn’t warm up to this as most failed to recognise the clever juxtaposition of these forms. A few years ago, before movies like Suntali was possible in Nepali cinema, there were movies which drew attention of the guardians of world cinema with their understanding of the craft and the vision to elevate it beyond the trappings of such. Deepak Rauniyar’s Highway gave a whole new generation of Nepali filmgoers what a ‘world cinema’ made in Nepal would look like. Highway raised eyebrows with its sordid depiction of the modern Nepali society, and combined multiple narratives to its proceedings which had, until then, been the domain of directors like Alejandro González Iñárritu and Mani Ratnam. Most members of the audience shrugged off the movie, their reason being that the movie was ‘too foreign’. Even more could not stand the fact that director Rauniyar had chosen not to give his myriad characters a closure. Even after the screening of the much-anticipated Kalo Pothi at a local multiplex, I overheard similar concerns– reason enough to say the audience has not completely woken up to movies like Suntali and Highway. -