Where are we heading to?

As we are busy celebrating our new president in Nepal Film Development Company, Raj Kumar Rai, it is wise for us to reflect back on what audiences have been feeding on from our cinema all these years.

Too often, cinema is considered reliable medium to reflect our society & our films have voiced the ethos of the common man through decades with remarkable endurance.

We have seen the birth of cinema & its social black and white impact on celluloid, on the very onset of 60s itself. The whole of 70s & 80s celebrated the much infamous Panchayat. The disillusionment era of new found multi-party-system was then amply exemplified by the great Rajesh Hamal. Here, a hero was born !
 Rajesh Hamal was cherished. Rajesh Hamal became the god-man. And that's when we drifted into a condition where Rajesh Hamal was seen doing almost all same looking films, with same looking expression of 'heyy'. The then Nepali cinema industry seemed bankrupt of ideas to take cinema forward. As the new generation found floppy and mobiles and understood the world better, our films failed to mirror the change. Today the same old film makers blame us for all the mishaps of the industry.

The old gear of cinema has now shifted to new film makers. New films are being made, with a new taste brewing. There is something ghastly amiss though. We never dared to attempt a Nepali film that defined us in the world. The song-and-dance routine is a blueprint of Bollywood that is widely identical to the western world, in the same spirit as snake chambers to them.

Digging down our poverty and making silly commercial fare is all that we have done over the past 50 years. We learnt to keep classes fool by selling our budget’s woes to them and we honored insulting plots just to let the masses know there was an alternative to their humdrum lives for a few hours - if they were willing to pay a few rupees for the privilege.

With all our technical expertise and good preaching directors in the field, there is not a good example of what a Nepali film is. We do not have handful of films that stands out among the best.We are caught up in celebrating Binod Pradhan's IIFA moment here because he once lensed our films but nobody gives a damn to produce our own Binod Pradhan here for commercial reasons.

We are taught a misnomer Satya Harishchandra was our first film when in fact we have no supporting evidence to claim its accuracy. The first film, for me, was the black & white Aama that released in 1964. We have not cared to preserve most of our cinematic heritage and early films because hey, who needs to go back to history when the future is not so political, right? Not a single good media institute of repute has been borne in this country that really cares for cinema, if not for a profitable job.
Today the producer is dream merchant. He dreams a film which is already out in a torrent web. This is where cinema is heading to the monopolisation road. Audiences watch not what they want, but what your producer or a wig hero wants. If we really want to make cinema, we need to stop being another mo-mo stall.

We need to exercise on bringing out a writing pool that can mine and bring out our local subjects that can travel across the world. Why there has never been an entertaining film on Kumari culture or Sherpa's multi-husband culture in the same vein as martial arts movies - I have never understood.

Above all, we need to work on a movie-making experience that defines us as an individual. We should develop our own different genres that tell stories about our people. We should develop our own taste. India, with their fascinating song and dance routine, has made Hollywood's studio to step down there, only to produce Hindi films with them.

Change is inevitable. Audiences are in fact rejecting the plastic plots. If the success of Kabaddi is anything, but the indication of change. Audiences, as usual, not finding Rajesh Hamal or Nikhil Uprety in the posters, flock to these films.

This must change. We, as film-makers, must demand that movies be as much about creating art as it is right now about securing the budget woes. This is difficult to do in the era of Rekha Thapa and Shovit Basnet but not wholly impossible.
Ultimately, when you look deep down on yourself, you will find that Nepali film industry is nothing but a body on which film makers have craved their dreams and yearnings.You might need a strong searchlight to narrow down its soul though.