'Children of the Snow Land' is a very moving feature documentary about three teenagers Nima, Tsering Deki and Jeewan who, aged 4-6 years old, were brought from practically inaccessible, very poor, villages in the Himalayas in Nepal to a boarding school 'Snow Land' in Kathmandu (run by a Buddhist monk and funded by charity) by their relatives and were left there alone without anybody from their families ever visiting them. All just for the sake of education and a better, than their own, future for these children.
Now that they are about to graduate they have a lucky chance to go back to their villages and visit their families for three months. They feel very excited but also a little insecure about their journeys back home. It takes them a 14-hour bus ride, a flight and a half a week to two weeks (the children live in different parts of the Himalayan region) of a dangerous climb, for some of them in freezing temperatures with the risk of avalanches, and of course, reconnecting with their families and communities, and a lot of reflection on the reasons of their abandonment to understand why their parents had to be cruel. Only to be kind.
The film crew provided these three students with video gear and training - they turned out to be great at filming and video storytelling, and, as a result, we are awarded with some stunning landscape views from some of the remotest and hardest-to-reach places in the Himalayan mountains that we will never be able to visit ourselves.
I loved all the story lines in the film, but my favorite one is probably that of lovely Tsering. It seems for her mother it was a very hard decision to send her away when she was still a toddler, but looking at the hard life of a woman in such places where men (judging from Tsering's father's film appearance) drink tea and talk with their buddies all day, and watch TV in the evenings, I can totally understand the sacrifice her mother chose to make.
I loved this doc. I watched it with my children, and they were equally moved by these children's life stories.
The film won Best Documentary awards at film festivals in LA (2018) and Canada (2019).