Disgraced Top Gun fighter pilot Butch Masters leads a rogue squad in recovery of a WMD. Masters must navigate a fractured friendship, a love triangle, and must take to the skies to reclaim his military and personal honor.
Produced by Svarog Films, St. Petersburg, Russia.
A Nepali feature film set in the early 2000’s when the Maoist Insurgency was at its peak, this is a story of Uma, her brother Milan and their mother, living in a small town in rural Nepal. Their relationship is tested when the winds of change gradually whips up a storm gripping the family in eternal conflict.
A small film could not have a bigger philosophical question: what is more important, inner development or outward social action?
In a nunnery in the high desert mountains of Mustang, a revered abbess dies, leaving signs that she will be reborn in the precious human form. Prayers and ritual must be done to help her consciousness into its next rebirth, but the nunnery coffers are empty.
The senior nuns decide that the only way out is get back money loaned out by the nunnery. A mysterious loan was made out to an equally mysterious Mr. Tashi who visited the senior nun in her last days. Given the shady rumours about Mr. Tashi, the nuns are convinced he took advantage of her in her dying state.
The two nuns assigned the mission to retrieve the money are Karma, a free-spirited nun, and her opposite, a textbook-sort of nun called Sonam. Mr. Tashi proves elusive. His shadowy trail leads them from the cloistered world of the high mountains, to the sin cities, and a host of small cruelties en route as well as Mr. Tashi’s growing infamy.
Karma is left to continue the mission on her own when her companion is temporarily disabled. Karma learns of Mr. Tashi’s ties to brothels and sets out to catch him red-handedly, but he turns out to be a rogue-turned-Samaritan, and Karma opts to return the money to him. A cool reception and admonishment greet her back at the nunnery.
Karma is absolved and redeemed when the mystery linking Mr. Tashi and the abbess is finally uncovered.
Karma, a Tibetan filmmaker from New York, goes to Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s exile headquarters in northern India, to make a documentary about former political prisoners who have escaped from Tibet. She wants to reconnect with her roots but is also escaping a deteriorating relationship back home.
One of Karma’s interviewees is Dhondup, an enigmatic ex-monk who has just escaped from Tibet. He confides in her that his real reason for coming to India is to fulfill his dying mother’s last wish, to deliver a charm box to a long-missing resistance fighter. Karma finds herself unwittingly falling in love with Dhondup even as she is sucked into the passion of his quest, which becomes a journey into Tibet’s fractured past and a voyage of self-discovery.
Festivals and Screenings
• 30th International de Films de Femmes, Creteil, France
• 3rd Festiwal Filmy Swiata, Poland
• 10th Ethnofilmfest, Berlin
• Circle Cinema, Tulsa
• Northwest Film Forum, Seattle
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago
• ImaginAsian Theater, New York
• Himalayan Film Festival, Amsterdam
• Austin Asian Film Festival, USA
• International Buddhist Film Festival, Amsterdam
• Munich Asia Filmfest
• Films from the South, Oslo
• Berlin Asia-Pacific Film Festival
• Independent South Asian Film Festival, Seattle
• Bite the Mango Film Festival, Bradford, UK
• Festival do Rio (Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival)
• Pacific-Meridian Vladivostock International Film Festival, Russia
• Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, New York
• 54th Trento Film Festival, Italy
• Minneapolis-St Paul International Film Festival
• Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles
• Roma Independent Film Festival
• Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, London
• 24th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival
• 2006 Bangkok International Film Festival
• Spice PVR Cinemas, Noida, Delhi
• International Habitat Centre, New Delhi
• 12th Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival, Canada
• 10th International Film Festival of Kerala
• 8th International Meeting of Cinema and History, Istanbul
• 1st Asian Festival of 1st Films, Singapore
• 2nd Amazonas Film Festival, Manaus, Brazil
• 53rd San Sebastian International Film Festival
• 30th Toronto International Film Festival
Dipak, boyishly handsome, a former football player, works as an uniformed guard for a successful businessman. Saraswati is a homely woman, who adores her footballer “hero” husband. With their two daughters, they are an ordinary, humble family, contented in most respects.
If there is one thing that life – or the gods – hasn’t given them, it is a son. Not unusual for a family in their society, it is an unresolved thread in their otherwise contented lives. Dipak wants a son, Saraswati wants him to be happy – these are lurking desires, waiting as it were to be plucked by fate.
There is much anxiety over Saraswati’s imminent pregnancy. One day while doing her standard prayers, a sadhu tells her only the goddess Tripura at the small brick shrine by the river-bank can answer her prayers. Saraswati does and it so happens a son is born. There is great joy, but a few weeks later, the infant dies, causing great sorrow, anger, and guilt.
The once-happy family begins to break down. Saraswati becomes ill, deeply depressed, and begins to exhibit signs of “craziness.” When she finally goes back to the goddess who she believes gave her a son, only to cause her greater sorrow, the Sadhu (Hindu hermit) suggests she get “treated” by a particular Mata, the vehicle (of possession) of the goddess.
Parallelly, we learn that the Mata, though reputed as a healer, has a particular history. Her husband left her at a young age, and thwarted love had lead to great emotional turmoil and even breakdowns, until she was possessed – chosen – by the goddess. The emotional upheaval of the Mata, a beautiful woman, however remains unresolved within her. She is deeply ambivalent about her shamanic role, about being “chosen,” and convinced only human love will restore her psychic/emotional balance.
It is not only fate but their inner wants that sweeps these characters together. They begin as friends. Saraswati is drawn to the Mata because she temporarily cures her and is fascinated by a spirit medium, the Mata by an ordinary human being’s warmth, but eventually more so by the boyish innocence of Dipak, which serves as a foil for her misdirected passion, and Dipak by the allure of something greater than he can ever understand.
The story has a violent ending, in the background of a frenzied jatra (religious festival), where people dance in collective intoxication…
“Director Tsering Rhitar Sherpa’s keen observational skills, previously honed on documentary subjects, skillfully evoke the frantic activity and abundant contradictions of rapidly developing Kathmandu, where the sacred remains ubiquitous under the onslaught of modern life. Mask of Desire is an intense, complex film and another promising achievement for Himalayan cinema.”
Asian Week, April 20, 2000
“It’s a great movie. There is so much in it.”
Nepali Times, September 5, 2000
“Tsering Rhitar Sherpa deftly escalates the conflict between the medium’s belief in her goddess-given mission and her unruly human desires, while refusing to offer a neatly packaged answer to the central question of her credibility.”
The Japan Times, Sept. 19, 2000
Himalaya is a story set against the backdrop of the Nepalese Himalayas. At an altitude of five thousand metres in the remote mountain region of Dolpa. Himalaya is the story of villagers who take a caravan of yaks across the mountains, carrying rock salt from the high plateau down to the lowlands to trade for grain. An annual event, the caravan provides the grain that the villagers depend on to survive the winter. The film unfolds as a story of rivalry based on misunderstanding and distrust, between the aging chief and the young daring herdsman, who is both a friend and a rival to the chief’s family, as they struggle for leadership of the caravan. It was nominated in the Best Foreign Film category at the 72nd Academy Awards.