Of all the films in this year's Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival (KIMFF), none quite matches the charm of H?kan Berthas' documentary Thin Ice.
Set in Ladakh, its subject is the plucky young student Dolkar, an aspiring athlete, who says her life would be "halved" if she didn't play ice hockey. In her effort to start a women's ice hockey team to compete for the national championship, her biggest hurdle is the patronising chauvinism of the men who find women's sports less worthy of investment than men's. In Dolkar's story of determination and ingenuity against the odds, Berthas crafts a small gem that warms the heart.
A charge frequently levelled against documentaries is that they are now so often preachy and unbalanced. So director Fulvio Mariani's Siachen: A War for Ice is a useful reminder of how terribly dull the traditional documentaries of the past have sometimes been. Told with little imagination, vision or insight, this film covers the 20-year, stop-start conflict between India and Pakistan over the Siachen glacier.
There are breathtaking shots of the frigid and desolate region and Mariani has impressive access to both sides of the border. But one major problem is the way the film notes, but then scurries away from, questions that are truly compelling, in favour of headshots of military personnel blustering patriotically.
Moreover, Siachen foolishly seems to think that India and Pakistan are fighting merely over a piece of ice rather than what in the 21st century will be the world's most precious commodity, drinking water, a resource that both countries seem to have irrevocably damaged with the pollution from their military activity. The filmmakers only mention this in the closing minutes.
Appreciation for this increasingly scarce but vital resource is smartly and satirically explored in Isaac Brown and Eric Flagg's Gimme Green, a short film about America's obsession with lawns and the severe ecological consequences this causes.
The filmmakers have assembled a diverse and engaging spectrum of perspectives, from the farmers who actually grow the grass on acres and acres of land, to an estate agent who prowls her neighbourhood to award \'lawn of month' because of her perception that well-manicured lawns keep property prices high. In a manner that has become popular in lofty American documentaries, the film allows its subjects to indict themselves by exploiting their willingness to express their opinions and values and contrasting these with troubling facts and statistics.
We Shall Overcome by director Neils Arden Oplev also involves American culture, but from the perspective of a Danish farm boy in 1969 who draws inspiration from the American civil rights movement to gain the courage to confront injustice in his own school. The film effectively illustrates the machinations of power that sustain a reactionary culture in his school-in this case the accepted use of corporal punishment-and allow those responsible to escape retribution-both things, I suspect, Nepali viewers will find remarkably familiar.
