A recent short-film contest in Kathmandu, featuring films of three minutes or less on the subject of climate change, put up by the British and organised by Himal Association, saw the showing of a staggering 124 entries. While the filmmakers, all of whom were Nepali, exhibited an impressive range and quality, it was a range obscured by the selection of some fairly typical public-service-announcement-type finalists. Hopefully, however, two sets among the entries will soon see the light of day: those documenting the effects of climate change on Nepali communities, and those exploring (and exploiting) anxieties and fears about the burgeoning climate crisis.
With crippling loadshedding, chronic water shortages, inflating food price and poor air quality, the Kathmandu Valley might be ahead of the curve in terms of a world that refuses to make any concession to the worsening environmental catastrophe towards which we are headed. In this sense, the Valley is the perfect home for a film contest on climate change. But considering how little Nepal actually contributes to greenhouse gases, and how much of the consequences it will eventually have to bear, it is somewhat disappointing to be treated to rehashes of rudimentary and sometimes dated sermonising. Undoubtedly, Nepal, and Kathmandu in particular, would indeed be a far more pleasant and healthy place to live if, for instance, its denizens agreed to compost and opted to walk; but it is difficult to see how any amount of recycling on the part of countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh or the Maldives would make a material difference to global climate change, other than to assuage the guilt of the middle classes of these countries and elsewhere. In the global nature of climate change, its causes and consequences, what is far more pressing are statements directed across the divide of the industrialised (and fast-industrialising) and the vulnerable.
Engaging our anxieties proves an attractive and fecund strategy for other of the filmmakers involved in the recent competition. Nightmares, and awaking from them, feature as a common motif. For instance, Prabin Syangbo's Step Up takes as its protagonist a recognisably apathetic Nepali youth, turning down every chance to take action only to wind up in a post-apocalyptic world of his own making. Raghuwar Nepal, director of last year's Dream … A Mess of Things, a free-flowing assemblage of interviews with Kathmandu's citizens recalling their dreams, takes a more effective, skilful approach to the same premise as Syangbo's. The film jerkily speeds up his images, overlaid with a syncopated beat: running kids carrying signs of impending ecological disaster represent the scary thoughts that plague our sleeping everyman, only to wake up to be surrounded by 'solutions' – recycle, etc. It is smartly done and well-executed, barring a few spelling errors. In a more direct vein, Anup Poudyal's My Green Home and Suresh Limbu's Get Your Act Together (which received special mention by the judges), along with the second runner-up 3Cs of Climate Change, are all slick exhortations on adopting greener habits with these anxieties expunged.
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Such prosaic suggestions on how to lower one's 'carbon footprint' might be overly represented, however, and, frankly, irrelevant. It is strange that the filmmakers have chosen to take this route when the funding country (the UK) produces 175 times more greenhouse-gas emissions than does Nepal, let alone the economic powerhouses of the industrialised world and Nepal's own giant neighbours. By rehashing tepid solutions to the ongoing crisis, we treat global warming and climate change as something preventable and reversible; the reality is very different.