Castaway Man | Kesang Tseten | 82 mins | 2015
Dor Bahadur Bista, Nepal’s most controversial intellectual of modern times, disappeared without a trace in 1996. He became an anthropologist by assisting well-known anthropologist Fuerer Haimendorf, but was mostly self-trained. He controversially argued that Nepal didn’t develop because of Brahminism, values of fatalism and hierarchy of the caste system. Stirring acrimony, he moved to remote Jumla to put his ideas into practice. Speculation over his disappearance include his upper-caste enemies; his alleged affair with a young woman under his mentor-ship; and becoming a renunciate on the banks of the Ganges in North India.
Kesang Tseten is a Nepali writer-turned film maker of Tibetan origin. His films have been screened internationally and have won prestigious awards there.
A Walnut Tree | Ammar Aziz | 92 mins | 2015
An old man reminisces about a distant homeland he wants to return to. The son and daughter-in-law argue with him. The grand children watch the tension rise. Internally displaced and forced to live in a camp, the family is caught between memories of what life used to be, insecurity of the present and the bleakness of future. The sadness and tension is unbearable, something is about to happen.
Ammar Aziz is a Lahore-based independent documentary film maker and a left-wing activist. Featured in the Christian Science Monitor’s ‘30 under 30’ from all over the world for his art and activism, he was the only Pakistani film maker to be selected for the Talent Campus of the Berlin International Film Festival in 2012. Ammar is the founding director of SAMAAJ, a newly formed non-government, non-profit organisation for creating rights awareness among the marginalised communities of Pakistan.
