SYNOPSIS
Living in Nepal’s Khumbu Valley, two Tamang brothers have different bonds with the mountains. One works as a porter for tourists heading to Everest Base Camp and hopes to become a guide. The other, a Buddhist monk in a high-altitude monastery, aspires to become a great lama and prays for his brother’s safe ascents. Each strives to escape the poverty intensified by booming mountain tourism. Torn between survival and dreams, the brothers face choices that could change their lives forever. (This film is screened with TAMASHI.)
REVIEW
François Kohler’s Eternal Snow observes two contrasting ways in which human beings relate to mountains. Through the lives of two brothers, the film brings together the desire to ascend toward unknown terrain and a contemplative impulse to humble oneself within nature in search of enlightenment. Lhakpa and Sang Bahadur, Tamang brothers living in Nepal’s Khumbu Valley, inhabit the same mountains yet form entirely different relationships with them. For the elder brother, Lhakpa, the mountains are both a tourist destination drawing climbers from around the world and a workplace where his skills and labor can secure a future. For his younger brother, they are a spiritual space for practice, reflection, and the pursuit of enlightenment.
Through the brothers’ intersecting voices, the film reveals the distance between two lives that have taken different paths despite their physical proximity. The global desire to reach Everest transforms the mountain into a consumable landscape, yet it also creates new possibilities for those who live there. The mountain thus becomes a complex site where worship and labor, sacredness and economic reality converge.
Eternal Snow neither treats nature as a pure realm outside humanity nor reduces human intervention to destruction. The vast snow-covered mountains quietly hold both brothers and the different choices by which they live.
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
The Khumbu Valley in Nepal stretches to the foothills of Everest and is home to four of the world’s highest peaks. This unique region preserves ancient traditions of wisdom that regard the mountains as sacred, while at the same time serving as a hub for high-altitude commerce and the excesses of mass tourism. The film seeks to explore these paradoxes without judgement, through the journeys of a monk and a porter, set against the backdrop of the 1952 Swiss expedition to Everest. It invites the audience to reflect on our relationship with the mountains and, ultimately, on our attitude towards the world at a time where urgent change is needed. Has the era of eternal snows already come to an end?
CONTACT
DokLab | Corinna DÄSTNER | mail@doklab.com
