Manakamana

In 2013, Manakamana was widely praised as a documentary of striking originality, winning awards at the Locarno and Edinburgh International Film Festivals. Co-directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez as part of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, the film is shot exclusively inside a cable-car carriage transporting passengers to and from the Hindu Temple of Manakamana.
With each ten-minute journey that the carriage makes above the forests of Western Nepal, the viewer is introduced to a new set of passengers, ranging from a group teenage rockers to a trio of elderly women. The passengers, however, were not chosen at random, but rather cast; many of them are personal friends and acquaintances of Stephanie Spray, who has spent much of the last fifteen years in Nepal. In large part, then, the film is a series of subtly rendered character studies. But Spray and Velez are also interested in how the presence of the camera affects the passengers’ behaviour, and in the dynamics of performance and concealment.
Since its inception in 2006, the Sensory Ethnography Lab has been responsible for some of the most singular achievements in documentary film. The centre’s director, Lucien Castaing Tailor (who produced Manakamana), achieved particular success with Sweetgrass (2009) and Leviathan (2012), documentaries about shepherding and deep-sea fishing respectively. Manakamana continues the lab’s proclivity for sympathetic and reflective cinema, and is set to cement the centre’s reputation as a pioneering force in the medium of documentary film.