Mukundo
Nepal / Japan,
1999, 105 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
-
Tsering Rhitar Sherpa
- prod
-
Tsering Rhitar Sherpa
- scr
-
Kesang Tseten
- cam
-
Ranjan Palit
- editor
-
Reena Mohan
- cast
-
Gavri Bajracharya, Mithila Malla, Ratan Subedi, Nirmal Pyakurel, Rama Thapalia
- source
-
Mila Productions, P.O. Box 3064, Kathmandu, Nepal. FAX: 977-1-479083. EMAIL: mila@wlink.com.np
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Skyy Prize contender. Tsering Rhitar Sherpa in person.
OTHER
The first feature film ever produced in Nepal, Mask of Desire explores the delicate relationship between the mystical and the modern in contemporary Kathmandu. Dipak and Saraswati, a young couple expecting their third child, live a quiet, comfortable life. Dipak is a good-natured security guard who still dreams of his younger soccer glory days; Saraswati a pious homemaker who adores her husband. When tragedy strikes and the once-happy family begins to break down, Saraswati turns in desperation to Gita, a jhangrini, or healer, revered in the community as a spirit medium. But Gita has recently begun to doubt her own beliefs, experiencing a crisis of faith that will ultimately have dire consequences for all three. The divide between the secular and the sacred has been explored before in cinema, but Sherpa deftly circumvents tired “science versus religion” clichés. For him, rituals and spiritual possessions are as natural a part of Nepali society as soccer or television, and his characters’ human frailties are inseparable from their religious convictions. This combination of personal desires and religious beliefs is highly volatile, and in the unnervingly quiet aftermath of the film’s frenzied climax, who can say which is the more powerful?
—Doug Jones
FACTOID #123
San Francisco native Mervyn LeRoy, director of the Hollywood classics Little Caesar and Goldiggers of 1933, was honored with the Festival’s first tribute October 22, 1965.
