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Journey into the heart of Nepal

Aseem Chhabra

French filmmaker Eric Valli likes to describe himself as a traveller and an adventurer. Valli first went to Nepal in 1971 at the age of 18, where he discovered what he called "great people and their great culture".

"You know, once you have been in Nepal, it is very difficult to go back to your little shoebox in Dijon [France], where I was born," Valli recently said. Since 1983, Valli has practically made Nepal his home.

Valli's first feature length film -- Caravan, a visually stunning French-Nepalese co-production -- was recently nominated for the Academy award for best foreign film.

Trained as a cabinet-maker, Valli felt the need to make a testimony of his experiences in Nepal. His articles on Nepal and its people have appeared in the National Geographic, The Smithsonian Magazine and Life, and one of his films, Shadow Hunters, was nominated for the best documentary Oscar in 1991.

In the early 1980s he made a journey to Dolpo, one of the most isolated areas in northwest Nepal. Dolpo is inhabited by people of Tibetan origin, most of them salt traders. Isolated from the rest of the world (it takes almost three weeks by foot to get there), the people of Dolpo make long treks through some of the highest Himalayan passes to trade salt for grain.

"You go deep into the Himalayas and suddenly you see 2,000 yaks crossing the highest passes in the world, and you say 'Wow, what a story'," Valli said in the interview from his hotel in Beverly Hills. "The first time I saw that, in 1983, I came back to France and wrote the first draft of the screenplay [for Caravan]. It is a very old dream of mine."

It took Valli a long time to raise the money -- Caravan cost about $7 million. After years of searching, he met Jacques Perrin, "a great adventurer, a visionary and a mad producer", who put together a deal with two production companies -- Galatee Films in France and the National Studio Ltd in Nepal.

"This film is very much of a UFO," Valli said. "It doesn't belong to the realm of traditional cinema. There is no recipe to the film. There are no stars. It is all shot on location. There are no special effects, no sex and not too much violence."

Against the backdrop of the majestic Himalayas, with its harsh natural beauty, Caravan is the story of two generations of Tibetan salt traders: Tinle, the old village chief who has passed along his trade to his young son, and Karma, a young, charismatic man, who feels that he is the natural leader to head the caravan of salt traders following the accidental death of Tinle's son.

Against the wishes of the elders, Karma leads a caravan of the younger members. Tinle is then faced with the option of a long winter of food shortages or to lead his own caravan, with the older villagers. As Tinle sets off on his journey, he is accompanied by Passang, his young grandson, Pema, his recently widowed daughter-in-law, and another son Norbou, who is trained to be a painter and a monk at a Buddhist monastery.

In the approximately 100-minute film, Valli has packed action, suspense and natural beauty rarely seen in any European or American film. He described the film as a Tibetan Western, with characters straight out of the novels of Jack London and Joseph Conrad.

The film stars mostly non-actors, including the salt traders from the Dolpo area. Other actors came from the large Tibetan community in Dharamsala in India, the official residence in exile of the Dalai Lama.

The film was shot for nine months from the fall of 1997 to the summer of 1998. Its location ranged from 10,000ft to 17,000ft above sea level, with temperatures often dipping to 0 degree Fahrenheit.

Valli said Caravan is not a political film in the genre of other recent films about Tibet -- Martin Scorsese's Kundun and Jean-Jacques Annaud's Seven Years in Tibet.

"It is, however, a political film in the sense that it shows what Tibet was like before the Chinese invasion," he said. "What I have tried to show is the traditional, untouched Tibetan culture. It doesn't exist in Tibet anymore."

Valli conceded that although life in the Dolpo region is extremely harsh, the people have a positive outlook. "These people are much healthier in their mind and much happier than the people I meet in Beverly Hills," he said. "Oh, sure, their life is not easy, but that is the problem with modern society. It is not because your life is easier that you are happier."

"You look at TV in America and Europe; it is so brainwashed by consumerism, by advertising and by what you should do and not do," he continued. "These [the Tibetans of the Dolpo region] are the last free people on earth. Tinle is the last of the Mohicans. I am in no hurry to see my Dolpo friends change."

Change, though small, is coming to Dolpo. The producers of Caravan are set to open the first school in the region. Karma Wangiel, the young actor who plays Passang, has already joined a school in Kathmandu.

"You cannot stop change," Valli said. "The best thing will be to hope that the Dolpo people open by themselves from the inside, rather than to have the outside forced upon them."

Caravan has been extremely well received in those parts of the world where it has been released. In Kathmandu, the film has been running to full houses in the Jai Nepal theatre ever since its release in October 1999. It has become the most popular Nepalese film ever and its success has given a moral boost to the languishing Kollywood film industry.

In France (where it was released as Himalaya), the film earned approximately $18 million in 12 weeks.

Caravan is yet to find a distributor in the US, but the Oscar nomination has opened the doors to several possibilities, Valli said. He described the nomination as a "surreal" experience.

"When you see the world of Tinle is meeting the world of Hollywood, the world of Steven Spielberg and special effects, it's kind of surrealistic, don't you think?" he said. "So it is very good to see that Hollywood has a heart."

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