Kesang Tseten

Drawing inspiration from Frederick Wiseman’s classic aesthetic, Nepalese filmmaker Kesang Tseten spends a year observing the community and culture of Himalayan immigrants in and around the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens. During the buildup to the 2020 U.S. Census, the inhabitants reveal their motivation to have their presence recorded, encouraged by visits from their political representatives, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In carefully captured verite footage, we see a rich portrait of people deeply connected to homeland traditions while adjusting to life in exile.

Dipak and Saraswati live a simple life in Kathmandu. A devoted father and an adoring husband, Dipak works as a security guard, while Saraswati happily tends to traditional housework. Their home is modest, and their two girls are happy. Life would be perfect for the pregnant mother if only she could give her husband a son. Desperate in her desire, on the advice of a stranger, Saraswati prays to a new spirit with miraculous results. When the blessing turns to tragedy, the distraught couple appeals to Gita, a jhangrini or healer, revered as a powerful spirit medium. Gita's own crisis of faith and, perhaps, her stunning beauty, forces all three to a dizzying climax, leaving the lines between secular and spiritual desires eerily blurred.

Dor Bahadur Bista, Nepal’s most controversial intellectual in modern times, disappeared without a trace in 1996.

The wealth and opulence of the Gulf States in the Middle East were built on the labor of cheap labor from foreign countries. In 2009, four young Nepali men left their villages for the Arab Gulf, their stories, like those of a few million that keep the country afloat, often disillusioning and, as often, empowering, captured in the film In Search of the Riyal. The Riyalists trace the trajectories of the four men since then and over 12 years, a chronicle of Nepali labor migration, illuminating the experiences for up to 3 million Nepali working Qatar (2022 FIFA venue), UAE and other Gulf States the last few decades.

This film documents a school reunion held at the centenary celebration of the founding of Dr. Graham's Homes, a school in northern Indian town of Kalimpong, near the border with Bhutan and Sikkim. John Anderson Graham, a Scots missionary who traveled to India in 1889, founded his boarding school for "destitute and abandoned Anglo-Indian children" in 1900. Graham was appalled by the condition in which he found children in the tea-growing regions of northern India, in particular the children who were offspring of the women who labored on the tea plantations and (male) British tea-planters who were not allowed to marry until they became managers. Later the school also began to take in disadvantaged children of other backgrounds, among then Lushai, Nepali, Naga, Assamese, and Tibetan children. The film maker and several others interviewed in the film are children of Tibetan refugees.

As youth leave Nepal's Mustang District and development advances, traditional lifestyles face extinction

Children, adults, and animals of a remote village in Nepal that has no electricity or shops, and is cut off from everything by a river, pride themselves on being "corner people."