When the Travelling Film South Asia festival of non-fiction films arrived in the central Nepal hill town of Pokhara in early November, the screening of 15 films—some light-hearted, but mostly activists' fare—proved to be the documentary filmmakers' dream come true. Could this really be happening? The venue, a commercial cinema hall with capacity of 600, was often showing documentaries to a packed hall of more than a thousand, tickets of twenty rupees were being sold in 'black' for up to Rs 200. Even an eighteen-minute film on the sexual identity of Bombay transvestites got a respectable audience of 250.
"Let us have a screening revolution!" has been a slogan of the organisers of the biennial Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu, and the Pokhara response to the travelling festival seemed to herald just such a revolution. It proved that documentaries, firstly, had an audience aplenty even beyond the serious connoisseurs in the capitals and main metros. Pokhara also proved that an audience that is not accustomed to seeing documentaries has nevertheless developed a taste for it, from word-of-mouth travelling all the way west from Kathmandu, from watching documentaries on television, and generally being capable of imbibing more information in audio-visual format than earlier generations.
The overwhelming response in Pokhara, which was much more than what the FSA organisers had seen anywhere in South Asia in eight years of organising documentary festivals, was also due to the fact that there were several Nepal-made documentaries in the line-up, including an archival film from the 1950s by a Swiss geologist, and several films on cultural themes made with deftness and depth by Nepali filmmakers who had themselves been groomed over years of watching documentaries from all over, in successive Film South Asia festivals.
What was missing in the Nepali films was the passion of the activist, which has defined much of independent filmmaking in South Asia before this, but that lack was more than made up for by films from the rest of the Subcontinent, from a scream of pain on behalf of elephants (P Balan, Kerala) to questions about what really happened in the burnt railway coach at Godhra (Subhradeep Chakravarty, Delhi), the sacrifice of girls to assuage male family pride in the Northwest Frontier Province (Samar Minallah, Peshawar) and the rhythms of life in a poor village in the delta region of Bangladesh. All these films were received enthusiastically by the Pokhara audience.