Achanak!

In a recent facebook post I was joking about the fact that within 2 days I had experienced my first Nepali movie at the cinema and my first Nepali earthquake and I was not sure which one had been the most traumatizing... Since I've been bombarded with emails from people all over the world going mad with eagerness to know what was the hidden sense of this bold declaration (or maybe that's in that dream I had about being a famous blogger... anyhow!) I figured some clarification was in order.

A couple of weeks ago we asked our friend Rajiv from Foundation Nepal, to take us to a Nepali movie as we were curious to get a taste of "Kollywood".

After a 30mins taxi drive that took us to the outskirts of Kathmandu (at some point we thought we were probably headed for a good old drive-in outdoor cinema seeing as there were less and less buildings and more and more fields around us), we finally came to a stop and walked into what looked like an underground car park: a wide slightly dodgy-looking concrete space and lots of teenagers hanging around. Rajiv must have noticed the suspicious looks on our faces because he smiled and told us to follow him to a tiny little booth on which were displayed 3 rates: 60, 80 and 100 rupees (approx 0.6, 0.8 and 1 EUR). I was wondering what could possibly be for sale here at this price when Rajiv pointed the few posters displayed on the walls around us. So, that's how a Nepali cinema looked like :) The movie was chosen based on which poster looked the best - I personally dismissed the one on the far right for being too cheesy with a couple walking on a beach at sunset - and off we were to see "Achanak"!

Well, we still had to queue to enter the screening room. You would have thought that's the easy part, queuing right? But no, all became confused again because on the right side was a veeeery long queue with only men squashing and pushing against each other, and on the left side a much shorter one with only very disciplined girls. Oh god, what to do?!?! Thankfully Rajiv was here to explain that in Nepali cinemas girls and boys always queue separately. When I asked if they were then seated in different parts of the cinema the answer was no and my attempt at making sense of it all stopped there. Rajiv taking pity on us told us we didn't have to fit in the queue and we could wait until everyone had gone in, phew!

We finally entered a gigantic room and what followed is hard to describe but more or less looked like this: an introduction with phone-cam home-made advertisements for local businesses with high pitched voices screaming into the phone's mic, the credits, then a seemingly random succession of scenes (ok, we don't speak very good Nepali but the fairly low complexity of the plot allowed us to figure that we were not witnessing the birth of the next Gus Van Sant), sound effects that make the Angry Bird's soundtrack sound like a Beethoven symphony, visual effects that surpassed our wildest dreams (think: rapid back and forth zooming on the actor's face for increased dramatization, square cushions for a pregnant belly, etc) and, thankfully, an intermission of 10mins in the middle to recover from those intense emotions!

Lesson learned, we should have listened to Nirmala (our local Foundation Nepal manager) who told us she never watches Nepali movies because they look too much like bad telefilms where death scenes are dragging beyond bearable length and girls run in rice fields wearing high heels "which obviously is technically impossible!" :)

Ok... I admit that all of the above is what I was secretly and masochistically hoping for (and it truly went above and beyond) and at least we got to know the local Matt Damon whose every appearance (which usually consisted in jumping into the scene out of the blue to save all sorts of oppressed victims - so what, after all "achanak" means "emergencies"!) was systematically greeted by the cheering of the audience. His name is Nikhil Upreti.

We wish him a lot of success and, who knows, maybe a cameo in the next Gus Van Sant? :)

For some cheese click here and for the pics click here