Video Production in Nepal | Through his own eyes

 Video Production in Nepal

We are in a roadside cafe on the East-West Highway, tired and crumpled from nine hours folded into a hard bus seat. A young boy brings us cups of chiya. It is after midnight, he looks about 10 years old. Jay pulls out his camera and flicks on the record button, the boy scurries away. "You must ask for his permission first," I tell Jay.

"I want to make a film about child workers' rights in Nepal," he says. "This is one of the big problems we have here." He's right about that, and yesterday he wanted to make a film about the lack of roads in the mountain regions, and before that he wanted to make a film about the lack of facilities in rural schools. He wants to film everything and I believe that given the chance, he will.

Video Production in Nepal

Jay is 18, and we have just come back to Kathmandu from a trip to his home village in the far western district of Doti, where he has been filming the story of his life. Jay was 13 when he left the school playground one hot day in June five years ago. He joined the cultural front of the Maoist PLA, which had been performing at his school, and spent a year and a half underground before he was arrested.

"I had nothing to stay for here," he says in his film, looking around the dark one-room house he once shared with six younger sisters and his parents. "There is so much poverty, my school only goes up to grade seven and anyway I couldn't study, there are no lights, no books and no room."

Jay's story is not an unfamiliar one. Most of the estimated 6,000-9,000 children who joined the Maoists during the conflict have a similar story to tell. But Jay is the first to do so in a documentary shot by Nar Bahadur, but conceptualised, directed and edited by himself.

Source : https://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=16859