If an interest in realism is a bellwether for a film industry’s relationship with social conditions in a given country, it’s always instructive to see where notable examples of the genre crop up. After 2012’s Wadjda prefigured the opening up of Saudi Arabia, here is a fretful example from Nepal, resplendently shot in the vast mountainsides above the eastern city of Dharan, but which agonises about the country’s modernisation.
Weaver Maila (Dayahang Rai) finds himself on the wrong side of progress after a road is built connecting the Rai village of Balankha to the valley below. With plastic tarps on sale at a local store now bursting with hot new merch, no one wants his bamboo mats any more. His electricity is cut off, stopping his scallywag son Bindray (Prasan Rai) from studying, and driving the youngster to instead obsess over other modern distractions: the elixir of Coca-Cola, which he uses to bolster his playground credentials, and the neighbours’ new TV, which ups their standing. Under pressure from his wife Maili (Pashupati Rai), Maila accepts the store-owner’s proposal to bootleg millet wine for sale down in the city so he can use the money to match the neighbours’ home-entertainment setup.
Director Nabin Subba, with only his third film in 25 years, initially tells his story of haves and have-nots in airily comic bursts. He makes effective contrast between the browbeaten Maili and the blithely unrepentant Bindray, who is always cutting school with (in his new shades) an increasingly gangsta swagger. But there is true underlying pain in how the supposed salve of progress works to divide communities, forcing some abroad for money and others, like Maila, into increasingly desperate schemes. After the brewing goes awry, he’s bailed out by the village elders: a reminder of the feudal hierarchy underlying the new capitalist economy, and of the upper ranks lining up for their share of it.
American cinematographer Josh Herum gives this humble parable a mythic grandeur, the closeups of the family filled with a radiant familiarity, and sometimes peering past them down vertiginous mountainsides, so to emphasise vast social precipices opening up in the country. These confident aesthetics only waver during a sudden final turn into tragedy – some corny montaging is needed to stoke the melodrama. Otherwise, this is a robust look at the costs of breakneck modernisation that has you rooting for the stragglers and casualties.
• A Road to a Village is in UK cinemas from 22 August.
