Returning to Nepal after five years in college in Delhi, Susanna Phoobo was shocked by how much the violence had escalated in her homeland. "Children were being recruited for war, but people seemed blas? about it," Susanna says. She needed to do something about it.

A year later, Nepali tv stations are airing Susanna's anti-war music video. The 25-year-old spent months putting together newspaper clippings and snippets from tv news and documentaries to accompany her five-minute song, Shanti ko Sandesh, by Susanna and The Axis.

The video features chilling visuals of everything from vandalism and street riots to smouldering ruins and corpses-interspersed with images of children running, playing, getting shot and picking up socket bombs.

A preliminary screening in June got mixed reviews: some raved, but others were concerned it was too graphic, especially for young children. Some local tv stations had similar reservations, and NTV even suggested cuts. Three months later, very few stations play the full video, usually cutting it short before the final minute, which features real images and staged footage of corpses and bleeding bodies.

Even so, the video is compelling-so much so that the first few times the lyrics, music and Susanna's powerful vocals may barely register. The lyrics are simple and poignant: 'They say today there were battles and violence in the village again/ they say many died, many were injured/ they say screams of suffering rent the sky/ they say blood and tears flowed as a river'.

Filming some parts of the video took Susanna and her team around Bishanku, on the Valley outskirts, where she worked with village children for the unsettling scene where a boy picks up a socket bomb, which abruptly cuts into the newspaper headline 'Child dies in explosion, brother seriously injured' and then a real photo of an 11-year-old with a stump for an arm.

Making fake socket bombs and smuggling them past security checkpoints out of the Valley was hard enough, but the children were leery about touching something that looked so much like the real thing. "Initially, the kids were scared, they knew everything about socket bombs," Susanna recalls. "We had to explain to them that it wasn't real, there wasn't anything inside it."

Encouraged by the response to Shanti ko Sandesh, Susanna is already thinking about her next project: a similar video on domestic violence. (Jemima Sherpa)