Caravan a film by Eric Valli Cinemascop, 104min
In these days of cinematic Himalayan hype it is natural to be sceptical about yet another celluloid offering on the ´exotic´ Shangri Laesque communities and landscapes of the Tibetan plateau and surrounding areas. It is therefore a pleasant surprise to find in Eric Valli´s Caravan a movie with a story, simply and powerfully told.
Eric Valli is a photographer-adventurer now turned cinematographer who before this has ventured into deep (sometimes officially forbidden) Himalayan valleys to come away with little photographic fables, such as on the "honey hunters" of the Gurung heartland of central Nepal. This time around, Valli has teamed up with Galatee Films of Paris to produce a feature film on the salt traders of the Tibetan rimland of Dolpo, in northewest Nepal.
The obvious reason for the film´s success is the director´s attention to the story-line, on which the locale and customs of Upper Dolpo then become natural appendages. In most of the Himalayan films made for Western audiences, such as the widescreen Imax presentation Everest, or even Bernardo Bertolucci´s The Little Buddha, it has tended to be the other way around.