Introduction

1Asha Magrati and Deepak Rauniyar are among the most internationally visible contemporary film-makers working in and about Nepal, known for fiction films that fuse social realism with popular forms – road movie, thriller, procedural – without softening their political edge. As a Dalit woman actor-producer (Magrati) and a Madhesi writer-director-producer (Rauniyar), they work from positions that Nepali cultural institutions have often treated as marginal: their bodies, accents, languages and narrative priorities do not align neatly with the industry’s habitual ‘centre’. Their outsider status shapes and conditions their practice, informing what they choose to show, whose speech and skin tones they render with care, and which everyday hierarchies – caste, colourism, gendered authority and linguistic dominance – become visible in their frames.

2Their collaboration has unfolded across multiple registers and scales, from theatre and radio drama to short and feature film-making. Early work such as Chaukaith (Threshold 2008) already foregrounded questions of household membership, language and recognition in the plains; later features – including Highway (2012), White Sun (2016) and Pooja, Sir (2024) – extend these concerns to stories where mobility, mourning, policing and protest become lenses through which the audience can make sense of the state’s uneven distribution of belonging. In White Sun, funeral rites and village choreography expose caste and political fracture without didactic explanation. In Pooja, Sir, a crime-thriller structure carries an investigation into racism, gendered authority and the Madhesh uprisings, while refusing the familiar comforts and stereotypes.

3I conducted this interview in English by email in December 2025 and January 2026. Once drafted, questions and clarifications were addressed using voice messages, and often in the Nepali language. Magrati and Rauniyar’s work offers a rare combination: the formal command of very distinct genres alongside a sustained commitment to cinema as an ethical and political practice. The conversation moves between lived experience and craft – how multilingual dialogue is staged and subtitled; how cinematography and colour grading can resist ‘fairness’ as an aesthetic ideology; and how characters are built through rehearsal and improvisation rather than out of reverence for a fixed script. The interview also confronts the less glamorous architecture of film-making: censorship and script approval regimes, self-censorship, financing under restrictive laws, distribution bottlenecks and the cumulative exhaustion of making socially aware films in a market not designed to sustain them. Throughout, Magrati and Rauniyar speak candidly about what it costs to keep doing work that refuses to translate Nepal into a postcard – whether for domestic gatekeepers or international appetites – while still stubbornly holding on to hope.

Setting the scene

4Asha Magrati and Deepak Rauniyar first crossed paths on the set of Karma, Tsering Rhitar Sherpa’s film set in a Mustang nunnery and released in 2006. Deepak was assistant director, wrangling logistics and the schedule; Asha had been called for a single evening’s shoot in a small acting role. They barely spoke. Asha was given Deepak’s number to coordinate call times, and that was that – or so they thought. Years later they realised that this had been the first time they met.

5There were no immediate sparks, and no grand epiphany about a future partnership. Months passed with no contact on either side. On New Year’s Eve 2004, Deepak received a simple text: ‘Happy New Year’. A polite exchange followed until she finally asked, ‘Who are you?’ Asha had been messaging friends en masse and had mistaken him for another Deepak’ – an easy mistake due to Deepak’s being a common name in Nepal. The following New Year’s Eve she texted him again, this time deliberately; he didn’t text back – he phoned, emboldened after a couple of drinks – and began flirting. Friendship followed and collaboration too: plays and a documentary around the April 2006 movement at the end of the civil war.

6They were, they realised, both outsiders in the Nepali film industry: Asha, a Dalit woman whose accent wasn’t considered ‘pure’ when she spoke Nepali; Deepak, a Madhesi man from Nepal’s plains. Neither face nor voice matched what the system traditionally wanted or expected, on screen or behind it. Life, meanwhile, kept pushing them together.

Asha:2006 was tough. My mother died at the end of the People’s Movement in 2006 (24 April 2006), simply from a lack of medicine. I didn’t even get to see her before she passed away. My sister-in-law and the nieces I was caring for had moved to California earlier. I was alone in a Kathmandu flat I couldn’t afford. Together with Deepak, his sister and brother, and our journalist friend Dambar Krishna Shrestha, we found a place in Kupandole (in Patan) and moved in together. It feels like Deepak was my mother’s last gift.

Deepak:We started a production company and made our short film Chaukaith (‘Threshold’) in 2008. It premiered at the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival. The story – of a Pahadi single mother, a census officer on her last day of work, and a Madhesi woman who had forgotten her own name and didn’t consider herself part of the household – came from my sister-in-law.

Asha:We had collaborated before – as Deepak was writing and directing BBC radio dramas in Nepal – but this was our first journey together as producers inside Nepali cinema.

Pathways into film and lived experience

7Magrati and Rauniyar’s work repeatedly returns to the everyday ‘micro-infrastructure’ of belonging in Nepal – citizenship papers, surnames, police checkpoints, rental agreements, accents and the low-level humiliations that decide who moves easily and who is made to wait. These dynamics surface early in Chaukaith (Threshold) through a census encounter in the plains, and later in Highway and Pooja, Sir through mobility, policing and public bureaucracy.

Mark Turin:You’ve described your partnership as crossing Pahadi/Madhesi lines. How have daily bureaucratic challenges – such as citizenship and housing – shaped your lives and your films? How much of what you’ve lived do we see on screen, and how do you decide what to transpose directly, versus what to fictionalise or displace into another plot?

Asha and Deepak:We both deeply believe in personal cinema. The influential French film director, Robert Bresson, is believed to have said: ‘Make visible what, without you, might never be seen’. That line really resonates with us. All of our films connect to what we have lived or witnessed. We don’t put anything on screen that we don’t know from our own lives and that we have touched with our hands. Most projects start from lived experience; and our deep research then expands this outwards.

MT:What were your routes into acting, directing and film-making? Were you fully supported? I’d also love to hear about the practical pathways and opportunities that shaped the roles that felt ‘available’ to you. In what way did you have to learn the hard way to keep on working?

Asha and Deepak:There was no state funding for us, and there were no film schools when we started. We knew no one like us – Dalit and Madeshi – in the Nepali film industry. There were no family maps to follow or uncles with relations who could guide us and open doors. We didn’t ‘dream of cinema’ in the standard way that people do, as we had no framework within which to dream.

Asha:I grew up in a British Army camp in Dharan, a recruitment camp for young Nepalis looking to join a Gurkha regiment, where my father worked as an upholsterer. He was an ex-British Gurkha soldier and, during his time, he served in Southeast Asia, Burma, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Brunei and other locations. The army club, open to staff, families and civilians, showed films every Tuesday and Saturday. I’ve actually just finished writing a short film ‘That Saturday’, which follows a seven-year-old girl (inspired by my childhood) in her mission to find 50 paisa to get into the club to watch films. Back then, I did everything to get into that dark room: collecting coins left at temples, selling sugar cane from home and even stealing my brother’s small change – anything, just to sit in the dark and watch movies.
After the 1990 movement for democracy in Nepal, when I was about 14 years old, student unions started staging plays for the elections. I was painfully shy and rarely spoke to others, but I knew for a fact that I wanted to act. When a boy asked if I wanted a role in a play, I immediately said yes. I didn’t even have to think for a moment. Later, I joined Anam Natya Jamat (the ‘Nameless Theatre Group’, founded in 1987) from Dharan, did some video films and then moved to Kathmandu to train in theatre. My parents were supportive, though generally clueless – when my mother first saw rain on TV, she thought it was raining outside. Most of my big stage roles were with Studio 7, an International Actor’s Ensemble based in Kathmandu. It had been founded in 1981 and was run by Sabine Lehmann. These were large English-language productions with a Broadway-like swagger. Nepali directors rarely offered me leads; when they did, they were small parts. I will say that actor B S Rana was an exception. Radio often rejected me for roles in dramas because my Nepali didn’t sound quite right. I taught acting as an extracurricular activity at a school and worked as housekeeper-in-charge at the Vajra Hotel to finance my theatre work.

Deepak:I grew up in a village in eastern Nepal, in what’s now Belaka Municipality in Udayapur district. There was no cinema. I was 13 when I saw my first film in a theatre. At college, I watched everything I could – mostly Bollywood and some Nepali films. I was born under the Panchayat rule in Nepal, and witnessed the 1990 democracy movement as a kid, then lived through the People’s War, the 2006 and 2007 street protests, and then the Madhes uprisings.
Yet, curiously, none of that was shown on screen. Nepali cinema was busy recycling borrowed Bollywood formulas: the same clichéd story of a poor man falling in love with a rich woman, five song-and-dance sequences, and four or five fight scenes. The heroes were always ‘Ram’, villains always ‘Rawan’, and women characters were treated like ornaments. Moreover, people like me – or Asha for that matter – weren’t on screen or behind the camera. It was that very absence that pulled me in.
During my undergraduate years, in order to fund my education and cover the fees, I wrote for newspapers, beginning at Deurali, a local weekly in Biratnagar where I was studying, but soon writing for national papers like गतिविधि साप्ताहिक (Gatividhi sāptāhik), then Himalaya Times Daily and later the fortnightly Himal Khabar Patrika. I also worked as a stringer for Radio Nepal, the national public broadcasting service.
After graduating, I moved to Kathmandu. I’d spent my college years in Biratnagar, where – because I was the only media representative – I had to report on everything, including politics. In Kathmandu, I finally had room to focus. I began writing about art: cinema, music, paintings. That work opened doors. It brought me into film-makers’ homes and libraries, and onto film sets. Before long, I wasn’t just writing about film-makers – I was talking with them, working alongside them.
In 2001, I joined writer-director Nabin Subba to help with public relations and marketing for his first feature film, Numafung, a Nepali-language film portraying the culture and traditions of the Limbu community. Later, Nabin introduced me to Tsering Rhitar Sherpa, and that’s how I joined Karma as an assistant director. From 2007 to 2010, I wrote, directed and produced BBC radio dramas, then finally quit all that to shoot our first feature, Highway (2012). As you can see, I took the long road to film-making, with various twists and turns.

Form, craft, aesthetics

8Across their feature films, Magrati and Rauniyar are particularly creative in terms of genre. Highway uses the road-movie ensemble to stage stalled movement and social friction; White Sun works through funeral ritual and village choreography to reveal political fracture without overt exposure; and Pooja, Sir adopts the structure of a crime-thriller/procedural to investigate racism, gendered authority and the social context of protest.

MT:Your films are political, but they’re also thrillers and road movies. Which implicit and widely accepted 'rules' of the genre do you intentionally break and which do you uphold to grab the audience’s attention? More specifically, what do you consider to be ‘non-negotiable’ and when do you deliberately subvert expectations to make viewers uncomfortable rather than give them a sense of catharsis?

Deepak:Genre selection has, in some ways, been quite accidental for us. Highway began with an actual journey from Ilam to Kathmandu when I was working for the BBC. That day, there was a strike. Near Koshi, we came across a wedding bus that had been stopped. We were in a BBC car and therefore could move freely, so they asked for help. The bride was inside, but because there were no band and no groom, the strike organisers would not let them pass. We escorted them to the temple. On that drive, we started joking about the situation as a plot, and that later became Highway – a road movie.
White Sun was also born from a chance moment. We were making a documentary for the Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre in Kavre, and Asha happened to film a debate between a former police officer and a former Maoist soldier from the People’s Liberation Army. Our very first draft of what later became White Sun was set entirely in a hospital. Again, the situation came first; the genre followed.
Only with Pooja, Sir did we choose the genre first. After Highway and White Sun both premiered at A-list festivals, travelled widely, won multiple awards and received glowing reviews – but still brought in hardly any money – we realised that we had to think differently. We wanted to see if we could use a crime thriller structure to make a socially aware film. We thought of a director who does this very well: Kurosawa – especially Stray Dog and High and Low– to give the impression that the investigation is really about the whole of society.

Caste, class and the social framework

9In White Sun, caste and hierarchy are not really explained; they are staged – through touch, distance, seating, who gives instructions, who is ignored, and what kinds of bodies are permitted to carry out ritual action. The film’s political history is present in the room, even when no one names it.

MT:In White Sun (2016), rituals around a corpse reveal invisible lines of caste and belonging. How did you show caste without dialogue, and what did you refuse to sanitise for the audience’s benefit? Could you talk us through one or two key sequences at the level of blocking, props, sound, or editing – what you asked actors to do with their bodies and how you worked with the camera to make hierarchy felt rather than ’told’?

Deepak:We wanted to fit caste directly in the frame but without it being announced. The rules of the room do the talking – who looks like what, who sits where, who touches whom or what, who hesitates. The dead man’s sons don’t look alike: Chandra/Agni (Dayahang Rai) presents himself as a janajati (ethnic minority); Suraj (Rabindra Singh Baniya) comes across as a Brahmin/Chhetri. Plenty of men, women – even strong children – could carry the body, but no one asks them. You can see and feel the tension: they don’t sit near the high-caste elders or close to the body because they’re not supposed to.
Pressure builds up. After a fight with his brother, Agni thinks he can lift the body but the elders tell him none of them can. He scans the faces and understands. Later, old men debate about the future on a tarp, while lower-caste men sit on the bare ground. In the rain, children gather everyone beneath a sheet, yet low-caste elders hesitate to cross the invisible line – even when drenched. A pot-seller – traditionally a Dalit trade – arrives and needs to pass by but the elders bristle at his request. When Durga finally brings help – rebel soldiers– the priest walks away. We didn’t need speeches to explain what was happening, the seating plan was sufficient.
The film is set in 2015 against the backdrop of Nepal’s second Constituent Assembly – elected after the first one failed – racing to write a constitution in Kathmandu. That document had a lot to say about caste, gender, citizenship and belonging. By then, even the former rebels – the Maoists – had compromised on many of their agendas, including identity-based federal demarcation. But in the southern plains, thousands of Madhesis were still in the streets, refusing to back down, even after hundreds of deaths. The violence wasn’t abstract either: in Tikapur in Kailali, protesters killed police officers in clashes that became one of the defining shocks of that season. And there were still hard-line factions and underground currents in the background – groups that rejected the peace-time settlement and kept alive the threat of rupture. To pretend those tensions didn’t exist would be dishonest. Some viewers might have preferred a tidier message that the war was only bad and that nothing had changed. That wasn’t our film. We weren’t there to sanitise the truth.

MT:As public figures in Nepal speaking out about caste and racism, and addressing it in your films, what kinds of backlash have you faced at home or online, and what has helped keep you grounded? Have you noticed different registers of backlash, and how do you decide when to respond versus when to conserve energy, sigh and move on?

Deepak:We’ve been called names and received plenty of ugly comments online. At times, it used to affect me – and honestly, it still does sometimes. There was a point when I would fight back on the internet, but over time you learn to live with it.
We’ve lost friends, and even my family members have asked us to stop writing and speaking out. That’s been the hardest part – losing people close to us. But we keep asking ourselves: as artists and film-makers, if we’re not the ones asking hard questions, then why bother making films at all? Does it even make sense to keep creating if we stay silent?

Asha:What keeps us grounded is knowing that we’re not alone. There’s a huge community of writers and artists whose courage inspires us – people like writer Manjushree Thapa, film-makers Subina Shrestha, Nabin Subba and many others. Their work reminds us why we do this and it gives us strength to keep going.

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Colourism as craft

11One of the striking achievements of Pooja, Sir is that its politics are enacted not only through dialogue and plot but by texture: the fabric, walls, dust, sweat and light of the plains. In the context of South Asian visual culture – where fair skin is often treated as a default aesthetic – this is a provocative and political choice.

MT:Colourism is rarely discussed as a craft issue in film. What did you ask of your cinematographer and colourist to render darker skin faithfully and did you have to push back against dominant South Asian norms of beauty? Where did you find the strongest resistance – on set (make-up, lighting), in post-production or in the audience’s expectations?

Deepak:From the start, I knew I needed key collaborators – a cinematographer, editor and colourist – who were people of colour and/or women, or at least people who truly understood colourism and racism, and had worked with actors with darker complexions.
For cinematography, I first spoke to Jomo Fray, who is Black, and then connected with Sheldon Chau, a Vietnamese American of Chinese ancestry, who had shot in Senegal and worked in India. From our first Zoom, he understood immediately what I thought about the racial, colour and gender complexity of our characters. I sent him two books – Prashant Jha’s The Battle of the New Republic, Aditya Adhikari’s From Bullet to Ballot– as well as a folder of articles and street footage from the southern plains. One rule guided us: we would respect regional differences in culture and language and reflect real life. We wouldn’t fear darkness, and we wouldn’t ‘pop’ faces with frontal fill or artificially brighten skin.
We initially flirted with a subdued thriller palette, but were corrected by the location scouting process. Janakpur and Birgunj walls are saturated; Madhesi women are fearless in the colour choices of their clothes. We embraced practical lighting – single bulbs, real fixtures – no beauty diffusion on principle, and if we used any additional lighting, we tested on the darkest face first. Costume and make-up followed suit. We did have to fight with makeup artists and actors and actresses from time to time and police them, or explain it to them, but we preferred no whitening powders, no foundation that erased undertones; and sweat, heat and dust were welcome and allowed to be present. Days in the plains deepened Asha’s complexion so we didn’t ‘correct’ it.
Later, I collaborated with Stephanie Park in grading and with J Him Lee in editing, both women. The first colour pass was tasteful; the second was bolder. We went to embrace the Madhesi colour. We pushed against the ‘fairer is cleaner’ ideology at every step – from exposure to Look-Up Tables (files used in film-making and photography to adjust the colour and tone of an image or video by mapping input values to output values). The job wasn’t to make skin lighter; it was to let people look like themselves while the place kept its colour without stealing theirs.

MT:Asha, you’ve spoken about being passed over due to expectations of ‘pure’ Nepali and racialised casting. Can you offer any examples? If you could redesign film school or the industry to counter that bias, what would it require from producers and casting directors? I’m also curious about how accent, diction and ideas of ‘standard spoken Nepali’ become hiring criteria, and how training institutions might address that?

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Identity, language, translation

13Across Pooja, Sir, language difference is not a decorative marker of ’local colour’; it is part of the plot and story. In different contexts, Nepali, Maithili and Hindi can convey intimacy, coercion, suspicion and institutional authority, and subtitling can both cushion some viewers or confront others with their linguistic limits.

MT:Pooja, Sir moves across Nepali, Maithili and Hindi. What principles guided code-switching. Who translates for whom, and whose words are left untranslated? How did you navigate subtitling, in particular the difference between a domestic release (where linguistic hierarchy is lived) and international circulation (where subtitles become the main access point for an audience not familiar with local languages)?

Deepak:Yes, the film moves across and between Nepali, Maithili and Hindi. Our rule – with a political edge – was simple: people speak the language they would actually use with that person in that context. Nepali with Nepali speakers, Maithili with Maithili speakers and the state always defaults to Nepali. Rajagunj is a fictional place but is essentially Janakpur, and we shot the film there.
Our own research shaped two key choices that should be apparent on screen. First, the women officers run the press conference in both Maithili and Nepali. Practically speaking, they are attempting to reach a Maithili-speaking kidnapper, but it’s also how a public institution should communicate in a Maithili-majority town. Second, Saraswati answers the police in Hindi by choice. She speaks Nepali with the boy, but refuses to speak Nepali for the state when communicating with police. I grew up with strangers addressing me in broken Hindi, reading my skin colour as indicating that I was Indian. Our approach inverts this and recentres language and power.
But there’s also another layer. Many Madhesis fear being read as ‘Indian’ or ‘’Hindi-loving’, even though Hindi often only serves as the linguistic bridge within families and at home, as a Bhojpuri speaker may not follow Maithili, and vice versa. The fear is that speaking and using Hindi publicly gives people just another excuse to discriminate. We decided to appropriate that reality rather than hide from it, and I think that this decision made some viewers uncomfortable.
For the film’s release in Nepal, we deliberately did not want Maithili or Hindi subtitles, two languages other than Nepali that were used in the film. This meant that Nepali-dominant audiences would feel – albeit very briefly – what Madhesis live with all the time. But the board of film censors in Nepal required subtitles for all Hindi lines, claiming that it was a ‘foreign language’, so those were subtitled for domestic release. In the story, the investigative officer often relies on the local Madhesi officer as an ad hoc translator. When she doesn’t have access to translation, and locals refuse to cooperate with the language of the state, the investigation stalls. That very frustration is the point.
For international dissemination, since the film is already quite dense in terms of context and reference points, we kept the subtitles straightforward, prioritising comprehension and clarity rather than identifying the language in each line. I feel that our principle was quite consistent: code-switching follows relationships and power, and subtitling follows from that. If translation cushions the powerful, we withhold it; if it serves understanding or protects the vulnerable, we use it. And where the use of Hindi marks a contested identity, we show it openly – because hiding it is exactly how this system bias keeps winning.

MT:Did you ever script scenes twice – once in Nepali or English, then in the local language – to see what worked best? What surprised you in rehearsal or staging? And did you ever discover that a line behaved differently once it moved into another language – becoming funnier, harsher or more deferential – so that the politics of the scene shifted with the phrasing itself?

Deepak:We write in English for practical reasons and also because it is less political. Most financing, labs, grants and partners need content and proposals in English, and our films are very often international collaborations (such as with David Barker for screenwriting). For Pooja, Sir we translated the script into Nepali only to secure permission from the police; actors never actually used that draft. Because the police use a different register when speaking and make use of many technical terms, we worked with a retired officer so that the speech sounded genuine, not like a dictionary.
On set, the English script serves as a general map, not as the only path. Once the cast is confirmed, we rehearse in the languages that actors actually speak and would be used in that context or location. Lines that read OK in English often don’t survive translation. The weight of a line belongs to the person who has lived that experience. Sometimes, for example, only a ten-year-old porter can find the right words and think it. We build our characters first, and only then do I shape lines with the actors themselves, or let them improvise if that gets us closer to the truth. Then, we subtitle from the chosen cut, not from the script. Once the film is shot, the script is almost like an archaeological object. My script and the scenes that we ultimately commit to rarely match one-to-one. Some scripted scenes disappear, and new ones appear because in rehearsal we found something better. Translation also doesn’t always serve us that well, sometimes that’s on me, and other times it’s about the limits of language and our collaborations. It is in the editing process that we decide what to add or omit for foreign viewers.
So no, we don’t write twice in different languages. The English draft exists so that investors, labs and collaborators can make sense of the film and decide whether to back it. The second ’rewrite’ happens during rehearsal and through improvisation and we then build subtitles from those performances. Some ideas just live better in English than in Nepali; others only breathe in Nepali or Maithili and some simply refuse to cross linguistic lines. I think of our process as practical, not ideological.

Asha:There are also words that don’t travel well or are kind of untranslatable. Nepalis say ‘pari’ to mean ‘across’ (in India), but ‘across’ would be meaningless in a subtitle. In Pooja, Sir, the line ‘I prefer “Sir”’ sounded really strong in English, but finding a Nepali equivalent was awkward, so we ended up keeping ’prefer’. And CDO – Chief District Officer – carries a whole load of meaning for Nepalis: the CDO is a powerful state figure who has the power to decide who gets citizenship, who is heard and who is not. A CDO is almost always a high-caste Pahadi male, which is also central to how Madhesis were kept undocumented and dispossessed. The term CDO has all of these resonances at home for a domestic audience, much of which is lost in translation into English.
So in short, we draft our scripts in English so the film can be made, then we re-author the language on the floor so the film can actually live and breathe. The power shifts then start to show up there: in terms of who refuses which language, who mediates, who or what is left untranslated. Our subtitles try to honour that without flattening the context. It’s hard.

Blockades then and now

14In Highway, the journey is both literal and allegorical: a bus ride that is repeatedly stalled by bandhs and checkpoints becomes a compressed space where strangers negotiate class, gender, labour and political fear. Mobility – and the right to move with no justification – becomes a space where unequal belonging is played out.

MT:In Highway, the stalled bus stands for being stuck. If you rewrote it today, might the blockade be linguistic or political? Or would it be bureaucratic and informational – the politics around IDs, surveillance, social media and free speech – another kind of checkpoint that decides who is ‘legible’ to the state and what kinds of behaviours are sanctioned?

Deepak:Probably, yes. If writing the script today, I’d let one of the blockades be linguistic. Language is how power excludes the silent majority – at school, at work, at the service counter – by deciding which language counts. Back then I was hesitant about owning language. I understand Maithili but don’t speak it fluently and was mocked for this as a child. Even now, I sometimes look around me before using Maithili – afraid that my Pahadi friends will judge me for speaking the language, and my Madhesi friends for not speaking it ’properly’ or well enough.
Highway also pointed to a larger pattern: using Madhesi, Janajati and other minorities as a step to climb, and then stepping off without listening to their needs. In the film, Pahadi passengers desperate to reach Kathmandu borrow a Madhesi wedding band to cross the blockade. Once they arrive, they go their own way, promises are forgotten and the band is abandoned. The buses won’t take the musicians back.
What shocked us while shooting Highway was that we didn’t have to stage that ending. The last sequence is actually documentary footage. More than once, bus staff kicked band members off the bus as they tried to board. We left some of it out – I was afraid the violence would tilt the film in the wrong direction – but the truth is right there. If I rewrote the film now, I’d keep the political blockade and add a linguistic one: a scene where ‘standard’ Nepali silences a local tongue.

MT:What is your vision for Nepali cinema beyond mystic mountains and Everest conquests? In practical terms, what would it take – in terms of training, criticism, distribution spaces, public funding, regional partnerships – to sustain films that go beyond touristic imaginings?

Deepak:When Highway premiered at the Berlinale – the first Nepali film at an A-list festival – a trade review wished we’d leaned into the ‘spectacular Himalayas’. That’s exactly the postcard we’ve never wanted to send. From the start, we weren’t interested in feeding the tidy image of a ‘Himalayan kingdom’. Most Nepalis don’t live in the mountains, and Nepal is home to 120-plus languages and as many communities.
Fundamentally, we’re more interested in people than panoramas. Altitude cinema sells well – streamers love it, festivals programme it – but that isn’t how we work or think. It wouldn’t have been honest for us, and we wouldn’t have been happy. Our intention is not to confirm or exploit what national or international audiences expect from films from Nepal. It’s to show what’s true. Plenty of film-makers are doing the postcard already, and doing well with it. We don’t need to. We’re here for the human experience.

Gender and sexuality

15In Pooja, Sir, authority is gendered and policed at the level of address, uniform and workplace banter: a woman inspector being called ‘Sir’ crystallises how institutional masculinity is reproduced – and how queer lives may be navigated privately while foreclosed publicly.

MT:Why did you choose a queer woman officer who’s addressed as ‘Sir’ in Pooja, Sir and how did you calibrate the character against institutional norms of masculinity in the Nepal Police? What did you learn in research about how women officers (and queer officers) manage credibility, harassment, and danger – and how did you translate that into a film without turning queerness into either a symbol or a plot device?

Asha:The film comes from us – from our marriage – our two worlds trying to live together. I grew up in Dharan, using derogatory terms when speaking to darker skinned people because that’s what everyone said. My father never stopped using those words to refer to Madhesis or Indian immigrant workers alike, even after knowing Deepak for years. He never registered that they also have a name or they come from different castes and communities. For him, Madhesis were a homogeneous group. My brothers still think the same. I also used to think like that. Being with Deepak challenged and changed me. When police stopped us because he had two laptops and demanded a receipt for old computers, when a restaurant refused him service in front of me, when a crew asked when his family ‘sank into Nepal’, the prejudice hit me harder. In the film, Pooja tells Saraswati: ‘I’m a Pahadi. My skin is a different colour. The discrimination you’ve faced, I’ve never had to endure in this country, and I never will’. That was my confession too. I was scared to admit it on screen – worried that other Pahadis would be angry, or it would harm Deepak more – but honesty felt necessary.

Deepak:Because the story began with us, it was natural that the officer at the centre would be a woman. During research we met many officers from Pooja’s generation who were queer – ‘out’ privately, never publicly. The force is over 95% male so the cost is clear. We wanted to hold space for them. A more ‘market-friendly’ choice would have been a male lead. I even received offers to shift the whole film to Hindi and cast a star. It was briefly tempting, but that wasn’t the film we wanted to make.
Why ‘Sir’? Well, many women officers asked to be addressed as ‘Sir’. Some told us that once a subordinate says ‘Ma’am’, they get looked down on, orders aren’t followed and jokes start circulating. ‘Sir’ functions as a kind of linguistic armour. We didn’t invent that – we simply listened. So Pooja holds the institution’s masculinity when and where she must, and we let her private self leak through. Making Pooja a queer woman officer addressed as ‘Sir’ was a truth we kept hearing, so that’s what we wrote.

MT:Am I right that the character of Pooja Thapa is based on a real life story. Can you say more about that or is it too sensitive? And what line do you draw when adapting experiences that involve institutional violence, stigma or ongoing risk?

Deepak:The character is not based on one single person. Though we did follow one officer for over seven years, and much of Pooja – the behaviour, short hair, masculine presentation and language – is inspired by them. But we also spoke with others across ranks and the police force and wove those threads in too.

Asha:I also have a close relative who is queer and I’ve watched their life for years. Pooja and Rama’s relationship draws in part from them. And some of Pooja’s important backstory is inspired by my own life, including the dead brother and father.

Deepak:Pooja’s father is a composite – largely from what we observed between Asha and her father, and also from interviews. And Saraswati’s backstory is also based on a real person and a similar case involving beating and miscarriage. We wanted to honour these real stories without putting them in the spotlight, so we changed details and kept the truth of their experience. Pooja and Saraswati’s bearing is our way of celebrating people who can’t always be seen as themselves.

MT:Did actors or the crew face risks making a queer-led, protest-era story in the Madhesh? What protections did you put in place?

Asha:Yes, there were risks, both on paper and on the street. We worried that if we submitted the exact script, the police wouldn’t allow us to film. It’s unfortunate, but institutions like the police in Nepal increasingly censor scripts. Beyond Pooja being queer (which Nepal police would never have approved), we had a scene that involved a detainee committing suicide, frank exchanges on caste and gender, and language that they would have insisted we change. Swear words would be unthinkable. So we submitted a softened Nepali draft and kept our intention to ourselves. Even then, approval was received only one day before principal photography started, after multiple rewrites that had been demanded.
Twice our financing fell through. With a tiny working budget, we had to make use of real locations and real personnel. Uniforms were possible, but guns and vehicles were only accessible via the police, which meant more work. In our earlier drafts, everything happened at the district police office, but we had to rewrite on location to reduce exposure and reduce our footprint.

Deepak:We’d already spent years working in Janakpur, which helped. We hired a lot of crew locally, stayed in touch with journalists and community leaders, and built relationships with police and armed forces on the ground. Sometimes that meant doing unglamorous things – listening, drinking, posing for photos with people who wanted attention. It also meant swallowing open prejudice to keep the set safe. A senior officer told me to my face that Madhesis ‘have a chicken’s heart’, that he never puts a Madhesi officer on his personal security team, and that dark skin ‘looks ugly’ in a blue uniform. Not everyone was like that; several officers understood what we were doing and stood by us. We’re still friends with some of them.
While we were worried about staging unrest in a place that had experienced it, the city surprised us. Shopkeepers closed early so we could shoot. People brought water for the cast and crew. Many said, ‘At least you’re telling what we actually lived’.

Asha:A lot of our team were Pahadi. But we were upfront about the film’s stance and the language in it. The most exposed of all were the two of us – Madhesi and Dalit: writer, director and lead actor – the very people the mainstream would rather not see on or off screen, telling our side of the story. We were responsible for what the film said, and we were the easiest targets if someone wanted to make an example of us. I felt terrified every time the superintendent came and sat down in front of me while we were filming, especially at the final press conference, where I had a long monologue that exposed corruption within the force.

Deepak:Dayahang Rai – a Nepali superstar and our long-time collaborator – also produced the film and volunteered to stay in Janakpur for the entire shoot. On long days, he’d be on set as a camera assistant or simply shaking hands with officers. Ram Babu Gurung, a blockbuster director-producer, was our key local producer. The Madhesi journalist Ghanshyam Mishra was our local coordinator and manager. In the press-conference scenes (including the ending) we invited real journalists and, in the detainee ‘suicide’ scene, we cast real local activists.
In the end, the film has been a community triumph: little money, a lot of care. We protected people the best we could – by securing documentation, keeping our footprint small, rooting ourselves in the place and its people, and telling everyone exactly what they were stepping into.

Asha:The fear never fully left, though, but neither did the support.

MT:What forms of audience misreading did you anticipate and how could you prepare for them? Did you anticipate different interpretations in Kathmandu versus Madhesh, and domestically versus internationally?

Deepak:We knew that there would be misreads, and we planted a few on purpose, because they echo entrenched social biases. ‘The kidnapper must be a man’, ‘It’s the protest; politics did it’. They laugh at the idea of a woman kidnapper. But we never wanted our film to be a classic whodunit. The question isn’t ‘who did it?’ It’s ‘why would someone do this here?’
Our films tend to be packed with content and context and this one is too. At the core, this film is about racism. By putting a queer woman police officer at the centre, gender inevitably emerged as a theme. We knew the risk that it might feel ‘too much’ for some, especially abroad – but we couldn’t see any other way to do it.
So, we held on to these powerful characters and kept two points of view – Pooja and Saraswati. They inhabit two worlds. The film follows Pooja, but it lets you learn about Saraswati, a Madhesi mother, on her own terms. It’s a story that investigates one crime and discovers another. Did we find the perfect balance? I don’t know. Our aim was simple: keep the engine of a thriller, point the light at justice.

Society, politics, protest

16Pooja, Sir is a crime-thriller inside a very specific political moment: the Madhesh uprisings and their long aftermath – trauma, surveillance, resentment and unresolved accountability. The film-makers explore not only what happened, but how protest is remembered, misrepresented and governed in public narrative.

MT:Pooja, Sir is set in the context of the Madhesh uprisings, which started in 2007 and continued on and off through 2016. Which encounters with protestors, police or families of victims most influenced your script and how did you decide what forms of testimony would flow from which character – police, journalists, activists, victims’ families – without reducing very distinct experiences to a single voice?

Both:First, our perception of the uprising itself had to change. For a long time, our understanding of the uprising was dominated by news images of burning tyres, clashes and headlines about violence. Several people had died, including police officers and children. One officer was dragged out of an ambulance. In Kathmandu, the dominant belief was that the protests were sparked by Indian interests.
Once we started gathering videos from local journalists and activists, and looking carefully at what was already on social media, we were shocked by how partial that mainstream representation was. We learned that the protests were, for the most part, remarkably peaceful. They were often festive, filled with songs, dances, performances, with kids and elders walking together. People from different professions joined in, and in some places even Pahadi communities were present. There were no visible ‘important’ leaders on the ground. Women wore bright, colourful clothes. Our whole perception shifted, and that directly affected choices like the film’s colour palette and, crucially, whose bodies and voices occupied the frame.
We also met many young people who had participated in the protests and now felt silenced or under surveillance, and we spent time with the families of those who had been killed. The stories were heartbreaking. In one house in Jaleshwor, both a grandson and grandfather were killed by police, just one day apart: first the grandchild, then the grandfather, who was shot at the market while buying things for the boy’s death rituals. We heard accounts of protesters lying on the ground, bleeding after being shot by police, asking for water and a policeman urinating on them. Even dying wishes were not respected.
From the beginning, though, we were clear that we did not want to make only an ‘angry’ film. Such a film would never pass censorship anyway. In Nepal, if you make a film about a police officer, you have to submit the script to the police for approval. So we had to be smart about it, and find ways to bring these feelings and political realities into the film. We were often emotional and felt conflicted, but we kept returning to our original idea: to work with restraint and let some of these deaths appear in more subtle ways in the story, by allusion. The death of a suspect in custody, for instance, is directly inspired by what we learnt during our research.
We also interviewed men who had served time in jail for kidnapping and we studied case files of past kidnappings from the region. Saraswati’s specific story does not come from a single real kidnapping case, but it was shaped by something we learned about a woman who went to her children’s school to demand elections for the school management committee. What happened to her marked us. It felt like a perfect micro-example of how democracy has failed people in Nepal, and why hundreds of thousands of Madheshis were on the streets.
In late 2017, we realised we needed a second point of view in the film. We had to leave the police station and go to Saraswati to understand her on her own terms. We wanted a human character, not a frightening ‘criminal’. Giving her a voice alongside Pooja’s is one of the main ways our research with protestors and families changed who gets to speak on screen.

MT:I’m intrigued about the filming process for Pooja, Sir. We can see for ourselves the intensity of the heat, which I understand sometimes reached 44 degrees Celsius (111 Fahrenheit). It looks like the fan that Inspector Pooja turns on was not for dramatic effect, it was necessary! But what about the political context of the Madhesh at the time of your filming (July–August 2023)? How sensitive was it to reenact demonstrations and stage protests in the community? What did you learn, on the ground, about what the community wanted (or did not want), and how did you negotiate the line between reenactment and reopening wounds?

Deepak:We were very aware of the anger and trauma in the community at the time. There was also a trust issue with Nepali cinema – just before our shoot, another film crew in Janakpur ran into serious trouble; their bus was burned, and they had to halt production. So, honestly, we were nervous, especially since we had to block streets and stage large protest scenes – it was impossible to do that quietly.
To our surprise, on our first day of filming the street protest scene, the community came forwards to support us, and when we returned to Janakpur for the film’s premiere, it was an emotional and unforgettable moment.

MT:The film ends on a note of hope. Inspector Pooja Thapa asks, in front of the press, whether justice is really served. ‘Let me speak’, she says. In early September 2025, Nepal descended into political crisis once again, this time because the government suspended access to 26 social-media platforms, citing non-compliance with recent regulations (and widely criticised as a constraint on speech and dissent). The ban became the immediate catalyst for youth-led mobilisation around longstanding anger at corruption, impunity and joblessness in Nepal, igniting mass protests across Kathmandu and other large cities, led largely by Gen-Z demonstrators. The ensuing violence and brutal police response has left significant loss of life and thousands injured. Could you see this coming and do you, like Inspector Pooja Thapa, have hope? And what does cinema do – at its best – in such moments?

Deepak:During the Gen‑Z demonstrations – when the government collapsed and the country was on fire – someone wrote to me via Facebook: ‘This protest felt like the climax of White Sun. While the grown‑ups fight, the kids carry the body to the river’. I wish it were that simple. Did we see this coming? No. But through our films, we have been trying for years to address the deep-rooted problems in Nepali society: corruption, inequality and systemic injustice. Whether it was the struggle for reconciliation after the civil war, or the record police brutality – including across the Madhes movements of 2007, 2008 and 2015, where scores were killed, and with no accountability – our work has consistently pointed to the fact that the state can and does act with impunity.
And when that is the norm, moments like 8–9 September (2025) are bound to recur. On 8 September, police used lethal force against Gen Z-led crowds; at least 19 people were killed – 17 in Kathmandu and two in Itahari – in protests full of young people, including students. That was only the beginning: the September violence ultimately left more than 70 dead. These killings are not the first; they will not be the last. But hope? Yes. Absolutely. That is the premise of life, isn’t it? If we give up on hope, what remains worth living for?

Censorship and self-censorship

17Across their filmography, censorship manifests itself in various ways through cuts and screening certificates, but also as anticipatory pressure that shapes scripting, language choice and even subtitling. The censor’s ‘redlines’ are very real and at the same time aesthetic forces – rearranging what can be said, by whom and in which register.

MT:Where concretely did the board of censors draw a redline across your films, and how did enforced cuts alter meaning? If you were to teach censorship from your own work, what would you point to as the most important pattern: are the cuts about sexuality and ‘morality’, critique of state institutions, language hierarchies, representations of protest or the simple audacity of naming powerful people?

Deepak:We faced censorship from our very first narrative work, Chaukaith (Threshold) in 2008. It is a short film, but we were ambitious – as always, one of our weaknesses – and wanted to release it on the big screen. In Nepal, film falls under the Ministry of Communication, not culture or art. Even the name ‘Board of Censors’ already gives you an indication of the problem. The committee sits inside the ministry compound at Singha Durbar. To get in, you first need permission from the office, which has to send your name to the gate so the soldiers will let you enter. The whole setup is intimidating and bureaucratic.

Deepak:As you go from one film to another, you learn to censor yourself and to find a way to work around things. By the time we made White Sun, I decided to try a different tactic. What if neither Asha nor I applied for a censorship review ourselves? We asked our distributor to handle it. We had already seen how easily Hindi films get certificates and how they are watched. I suspected that if the film arrived in a different package – without being explicitly labelled as ‘Madhesi’ or ‘Dalit’ – it might raise fewer red flags. That's exactly what happened: we had no major censorship issues on White Sun.
Pooja, Sir was different. It is set in my own Madhesi community and is a very personal film. Despite my efforts to stay in the background – and despite having a strong local partner in Baasuri Films (director-producer Ram Babu Gurung) – the media kept pulling me into the centre and the board of censors then moved to block the film. They initially refused even to watch it, instead demanding the script and insisting that we ‘correct’ it afterwards, and only agreed to a screening once public pressure mounted. What followed was a rolling, ever-expanding series of objections – real news footage of the prime minister, the very term ‘prime minister’, Hindi dialogue, any mention of ‘India/Bharat’, and slang – not so much a principled review as a deliberate strategy to delay the film and to exhaust resources, amplified by selective leaks to the press. We explored a means of challenging them legally but were warned the courts were unlikely to rule against the prime minister and that the process could take years. In the end, with no realistic alternative, we accepted 19 cuts and even agreed to subtitle all Hindi dialogue in Nepali – an especially surreal demand in a country where Hindi films circulate freely.
What has been even more shocking is how easily society – especially the media – accepts censorship. Media companies are the first to normalise it. During small-group screenings or press screenings, people kept asking whether we would be allowed to keep the prime minister’s news clip. They all understood its importance and relevance in the film, but they were worried for me, not for the principle. When the conflict was finally leaked, journalists shouted at me rather than defended my right to use the clip. The footage belonged to a media house; I had obtained permission and it was largely available online – and still is. Our main job as artists is to question the state and society. That is also, in theory, the job of journalists. So this has been a deeply unsettling experience for me, seeing just how quickly the very people who should be our allies actually internalise the logic of censorship.
I have not yet created a formal ‘director’s cut’ that documents each enforced cut and its narrative function, film by film. But as someone who also teaches film, I have been thinking about writing a book in which my films serve as parallel teaching materials – case studies in how censorship operates, how we tried to work around it and how meaning shifted or sometimes became sharper under pressure. I do not know when I will have the time and resources to do it, but it is something I would genuinely like to pursue.

MT:Given what you’ve shared above, how restrictive do you find film-making and censorship to be in Nepal? What kinds of topics are sensitive? And how does the system actually operate in practice?

Deepak:If we compare Nepal with countries like Iran or even with our neighbours India, China or Pakistan – places where film-makers have done extraordinary work under very heavy censorship – Nepal is still in many ways a ‘free’ country. But it is also a country ruled by career bureaucrats who mostly did their schooling during the Panchayat dictatorship and who often have no meaningful relationship to or understanding of art, literature, or film. A Chief District Officer in Nepal is sometimes in practice more powerful than a Chief Minister. A mayor cannot hire or fire their own secretary or accountant, but ministry officials in Kathmandu can fire their subordinates. The large majority of these sachibs (secretaries) are male, high-caste Hindus. The worldview filters down into how films are treated, reviewed and understood.
So you start with a society that is already censoring itself deeply around sex, nudity, any kind of sexual expression, even kissing. Add to that anything that sounds vaguely ‘controversial’– expletives, vulgar slang or just even the names of other countries such as India, the US – and the film will be flagged. Conversations around these decisions are rarely logical. How do you reason with bureaucrats who are afraid of the word ‘jindabad’? Anything overtly political, anything that might later or one day upset politicians, any critique of the army is risky territory.

Asha:And then there is the question of who is behind the camera. Who is the director being called in front of the board? If Pooja, Sir had not been directed by Deepak Rauniyar, but by a hypothetical ‘Deepak Koirala’, I am sure it would not have been scrutinised in such detail. The censors’ idea of who is ‘trustworthy’ or ‘dangerous’ is built into the belief system they bring into that room with them.

Deepak:The restriction is mostly internal. Film-makers like me already practise self-censorship. I grew up in this very society. Until very recently, I felt genuinely uncomfortable seeing a nude character on screen, and I am still not sure if I could direct an explicit sex scene. That hesitancy is not only about the board of censors – it's inside us. We have internalised these values.

Asha:Another worrying development in recent years is that institutions like the police have started censoring scripts directly. The army has already done this. Now you can't make a film about the police without getting a certificate from them, and they will go through it line by line. They even censor everyday pronouns like timi or tā, insisting that every character must say tapāi, which is simply not how people actually speak. They censored Inspector Pooja’s last name in Pooja, Sir. Originally, she was Pooja Magrati, using my real surname. They sent the script back with ‘Magrati’ crossed out. So in the next draft we changed it to Thapa.

Deepak:Without being clever and indirect, it is almost impossible to make an honest film that is about the police. It is nearly impossible to make a critical film about the army, or to portray a major real-life political figure, or even touch the still-powerful ghost of the Royal Family. At this rate, it would not surprise me if soon professional unions – like the doctors’ association – start demanding script approval too.

Industry, labour, distribution and ‘political cost’

18Festival visibility brings one kind of recognition, but it does not resolve the practical problem of sustaining politically ambitious film-making in an ecosystem shaped by legal constraints on co-production, weak infrastructure, risk-averse investment and media gatekeeping. For Magrati and Rauniyar, the struggle is less about ‘breaking through’ than about continuing to do work that neither local nor regional markets are structurally designed to reward.

MT:Highway’s Berlinale breakthrough and White Sun’s Venice ovation helped shift global perceptions of films from Nepal. What kinds of backstage gatekeeping still block Nepali films from regional and global circuits, and how are you working to overcome that?

Deepak:Funding is the biggest barrier. Nepal’s industry is still regulated by Panchayat-era laws that don’t allow formal international co-productions, and there are no meaningful co-production treaties – even with India or China. That really stretches timelines: White Sun came four years after Highway, and Pooja, Sir took eight. After White Sun, we received offers of help from many places. Suggestions included managing film development in the United States, making Pooja, Sir a French production, and even directing the film in Hindi and casting an Indian male star as the lead. We refused because it would have undermined what the film is: where it is set, who speaks, and in what language. Without such agreements, we rely heavily on European public grants or private money, both of which come with conditions. Private funding calls for a recoupment plan that discourages risk. European funding is slow and exhausting, and it can come with aesthetic expectations: a more legible 'arthouse' look or a familiar picture of Nepal. A crime thriller that is neither a Bollywood-style commercial nor a 'sexy mountain story' – and one led by a queer, Dalit, Madhesi woman – becomes harder to finance both abroad and at home. When returns are uncertain, you end up taking other full-time work (for me, that means teaching) just to keep going; the work slows because life and survival intervene.

MT:You’ve said elsewhere that distribution in India remains difficult even when there’s interest from an audience. Is this a paperwork problem, a marketing issue or audience resistance?

Deepak:Paperwork is a bother and it comes with a price, but the bigger issue is a star-driven market and the price of marketing. Distributors don’t believe they can recoup their spending on a small Nepali film with no stars, so the films often don’t reach audiences in the first place. Even many Indian 'art-house' films struggle to be released. Gatekeepers simply won’t take the risk.

MT:How do you budget for 'political risk' when the subject matter is challenging?

Deepak:We’re not yet in a position to budget for political risk in any formal way – we’re still trying to raise enough to make the film! With Pooja, Sir we received Torino Film Lab’s Audience Design Fund and used part of it to travel and screen the film across Nepal, speaking afterwards with police, journalists, activists, teachers and theatre workers. We’re preparing virtual community screenings, but there’s no real budget. We hope to cover staff costs from the screenings themselves. Legal protection is similar. Proper entertainment lawyers – charging up to USD900 an hour – are out of our reach, so we draft contracts ourselves, sometimes without signing one at all, and we’ve already faced legal and contractual problems as a result.

Asha:To finish Highway, we went from crowdfunding to me babysitting to cover living costs in New York during postproduction. When we got the Berlinale news we cried – not only from happiness, but from the struggle – and in the end we had no money to fly to Berlin.

Deepak:And there are costs you can’t easily put in a spreadsheet: bribes, relationship-building, the small gatherings you host to make a shoot possible and fees demanded by local groups. In theory, you plan for these. In practice, you improvise – because finishing the film comes first.

Pedagogy and unexpected readings

MT:Teaching seems to have become a parallel workshop for your film-making. How has the classroom shaped your directing — and how do audience responses, sometimes far from Nepal, reshape what you thought you made?

Deepak:Teaching is closer to directing actors than people realise: every student is different, and you learn how to guide without being overly didactic . Having to explain choices – why a frame is built a certain way, why one cut but not another, why you stay with one character – has made me more precise in my own writing and visual thinking, and clearer in how I communicate on set. Teaching in the US has also exposed me to lives and pressures I did not know first-hand: fractured families, mental health struggles, poverty, race, religion and the particular precarity of international students whose futures are shaped by politics or economic necessity. Sitting with students whose countries are under attack or who fear discrimination or detention inevitably shapes how I think about character, conflict and what a 'safe' story is supposed to look like. It also gives a daily rhythm that oddly feels like heading to a film set.
There are difficult moments. At times you feel your authority is questioned – your knowledge reads as not quite 'white enough'. A teaching assistant at Boston University offered me a helpful tactic: start class by screening your own film. When I did, the atmosphere shifted. Either it was a different group, or the film functioned as proof, but the change was unmistakable. The classroom here also has a strong 'I/me' culture, which I’m still learning to navigate, but that negotiation – between worlds, expectations and who gets to speak with authority – mirrors the work of making films across unequal terrains.

Collaboration and authorship

MT:What is the Gograha Film Workshop and what was it set up to accomplish? How does it help ease the industry’s bottlenecks, by providing access to training, networks, equipment, confidence, mentorship? What kinds of stories or voices have emerged that you think Nepali cinema has systematically failed to make room for?

Looking ahead

MT:What’s your next project? Are there themes you feel you can approach differently now, either because of your maturity, because of political shifts or because of what the last decade of reception (and censorship) has taught you about how your films travel?

Deepak:We shot a short film in January 2026 in North Carolina. Entitled Private Property, it’s inspired by a real story and follows a Nepali woman in her 40s – a former schoolteacher who now works as an employee at a petrol station. In her first week on the job, she navigates between belonging and safety, her uneasy intimacy with customers and a growing determination to buy her first gun. The film addresses immigration, racism and competing ideas of law and order. In the summer of 2026, Asha will direct her first narrative film.

Asha:It’s a short inspired by my own childhood, set in a British camp in Dharan; a small, intimate story of a girl in a camp trying to find fifty paisa to watch Rambo. It’s a piece that explores colonial legacies, gender and caste. My own Cinema Paradiso.

Deepak:Our next feature is a drama set in Nepal, India and the UK, and is called The Taste of Salt. It follows a Nepali man – raised on empty plates and denied citizenship in his own country – who finds his voice in cooking and spices, and rises to culinary fame in London. We’ve just returned from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, where the project was selected for the Co-Production Market. We’re collaborating with UK-based Film and Music Entertainment, led by veteran producer Sam Taylor, to produce the film. We’re also in conversations with an A-list actor for the lead and hope to shoot by next summer. Asha is also developing a separate feature that she'll direct. And we’re developing a few other features as producers, with other directors.