“Nepalese street scenes with their horrendous traffic and seeing the countless stupas and temples for praying and cremating deceased Nepalese Hindus’ was a memorable experience. It was colourful and noisy, golden and beautiful, sometimes terrifying, but always inspiring.
The Festival was unforgettable and particularly so because of the seemingly endless energy, enthusiasm and radiant smiles of the organisers. Local young people who had been invited saw different cultures and learnt about the heritage of distant places often for the first time; and also about the traditional folk heritage of their own countries regions which many of them knew little about.
The festival features Folk Music and Traditions that need to be preserved. 20 year old footage re-discovered in lost archives and revived for the festival told an important true story “of a troupe of singers traveling through refugee camps and war zones during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971.
One film formatted in not-in-use-any–more-for…forever blurred VHS footage, showed folk music from Portugal; but who cares when such fine folk music has been saved for the pleasure, delight and interest of future generations. The edit of this material was fast and lively so the teenagers loved it, and I loved it too. There was lots to love about the local folk traditions of Portugal’s Cape-Verdean.
We watched a newly produced film, in HD, magnificently filmed (with the use of drone, of course), a documentary about the rapidly dying of a centuries old culture the Himba tribe of Namibia. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Receiving the Festivals ‘Music Therapy Film Award’ for the ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Being’ a JOS production filmed and edited by myself, was the icing on a very sweet cake called ‘My Nepalese Experience of 2016.”
‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Being’ has now been added to the British Library Sound Archive ,’Sound and Moving Image Catalogue’.
Vesna Marich
