Nepal International Film Festival

Official Selection

NIFF DOCS

Trails To Elsewhere

00:29:35|Nepal

Director:

Ulasha Gurung, Ashok Pahari

Country:

Nepal

Film Duration:

00:29:35

Language:

Nepali

Producer:

Ulasha Gurung, Ashok Pahari

Cast:

Tara Devi Panday, Nabita Neupane

Synopsis

Two sisters from the remote high hills of Jumla navigate the harsh realities of city life, selling vegetables and national flags to make ends meet. The volatile city spaces that they momentarily inhabit, merged with their trade, raise intriguing questions surrounding displacement and identity. Their days turn into a restless dance and their bond, a source of strength and resilience.

Director's Statement

Belonging to the indigenous Gurung community and having lived in the diaspora most of my life, questions of indigenous uprootings related to my own identity have laid heavy on me over the years. Though Tara and Nabita belong to the Khas Arya ethnolinguistic group and are indigenous to the land of Jumla, their internal displacement offers a profound critique of contemporary discourses about migrant workers wherein the term is often flattened into a singular, male-centric archetype. This narrow definition frequently ignores the nuances of internal mobility and the specific struggles of women. Tara and Nabita’s journey from the rural "periphery" to the urban "center" of Kathmandu reveal the complexities of internal migration and the intersections of geography, gender, and subalternity.

Perhaps the most evocative element of their journey is the object of their trade. The flag is a powerful symbol of uniform identity and cultural assimilation—a cloth intended to weave disparate lives into a single national fabric. Yet, for Tara and Nabita, this same cloth serves as both a tool for survival and a shroud that camouflages their own stories. In the act of selling the nation's symbol, they are forced to navigate the very system that often erases their voices. Their lives remind us that the "migrant" experience is not defined solely by the crossing of international borders. The distance between Jumla and Kathmandu, or between the diaspora and the ancestral home, is measured not in miles, but in the persistent struggle to belong.

Ulasha Gurung, Ashok Pahari

Director

Operating at the intersection of observation and inquiry, Ulasha Gurung is a visual storyteller and a graduate student currently pursuing her Master’s in Media Studies with a specialisation in Film at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. Having spent recent years freelancing as a documentary DP and photographer across Nepal and the Philippines, she went on to co-found threemm films, a production company based in Nepal, in the hope of embracing and establishing a creatively fierce, ethical, and transparent production language. A film studies alumna of the University of Essex, Ulasha views the lens not merely as a tool for documentation, but as a site of translation. To her, the documentary form is a process of constant learning and unlearning—a way to capture the volatility and friction of meaning. Her work is driven by the belief that the image is a living dialogue: an ongoing attempt to distill the complexity of the world into a language that is as honest as it is defiant.

Based in Kathmandu, Ashok Pahari is a storyteller and producer who rather than viewing production as a series of logistical hurdles, approaches it as an extension of the narrative itself—an intricate dialogue between the land, the people, and the lens. His expertise is born from a life of travel through Nepal’s most silent and storied terrains providing him a rare fluency in the country’s visual and aural languages and his work is anchored in the belief that authentic representation begins long before the camera rolls. He does not simply secure permits or source talent; he cultivates the environment necessary for stories to be told with dignity, transparency, and truth.