Fairytale of Kathmandu
DIR: Neasa Ní Chianán • PRO: David Rane • DOP: Tristan Monbureau • ED: Úna Ní Dhongháile, Declan McGrath • TRANS: Máire Ní Fhearraigh

It is not unusual for a documentary filmmaker to be the protagonist of their own film. Sometimes it is planned that way and the director actually talks to the camera-audience from the beginning, establishing plainly that this film is their point of view. Other times, the events of the film take a subject and turn it into a story, while yet others impose an editorial or even moral choice on the director, a choice that will change what the film is really about. Fairytale of Kathmandu is of this sadly serendipitous category. It is sad because neither the original protagonist (at least consciously) nor the filmmaker or even the audience would have preferred things turn out the way they did even though it did result a stronger and more compelling film than was originally intended.

Neasa Ní Chianán goes on a trip to Nepal with friend Cathal Ó Searcaigh. In ways she’s really still his student, as well as being a lover of his poetry and an admirer of his courage to be openly gay in an environment so traditional. He breathes beauty and life into a cause she holds dear, her mother tongue, an Gaeilge.

She set out to make a film that wholesomely sought to juxtapose the windswept beauty of Donegal with the mountainous splendor of Nepal, that sought to marvel at the notion of etching Irish poetry on the fluttering prayer flags of another culture, that sought to follow a hero to a source of his stories and inspiration, that went to see and show a people and the young men of whom she had so often heard… and also maybe to prove that tradition and modernity were indeed synergistic bedfellows, sources of progress.

All of this does happen in the film Fairytale of Kathmandu. In fact, it takes up most of the time and space the film disposes of. But Ní Chianán’s lens lingers longer than might always seem necessary. It lingers on the sadness beneath the poetics. It lingers on the poet’s lingering gaze. It lingers long enough to capture the hesitations, bewilderment and disapproval that rest just behind the circumstantial gazes of Nepalese caught in the camera’s net of memory, caught in the poet’s denial of what is really happening. It lingers long enough to tell us more than is said. Sometimes we want to look away. In fact if it were us, we might have pretended it wasn’t happening, or that it wasn’t such a big deal.

This film is not a fairytale in the Hollywood sense, with a happy-ever-after ending; it is more in the older European Grimm tradition, where the purpose of these fantastic narratives was also to evoke unfathomable fears and the darker sides of human nature, and where characters sometimes reveal themselves to be more complex than we first thought, including the narrator.

It’s a film where to relate the sequence of events is not enough, for it is constructed simply in such a way that the audience is obliged to share the filmmaker’s dilemma, her disappointment.

Seamas McSwiney

Fairytale of Kathmandu – Official website