On the Road With the Red God
Every 12 years, impassioned devotees pull a 65-feet tall unwieldy chariot in the Kathmandu Valley, its rider an enigmatic god worshipped by Hindu and Buddhist, on a months-long journey proceeded by abundant ritual and animal sacrifice. The enterprise calls for extreme cooperation and rigorous observance of ritual in the building, sanctification and pulling of the chariot. But the jatra (festival) is an arena of gritty reality, where participants vie for everything from a share of ritual meat, to status and proximity to the god. The chariot teeters, as does the community, between chaos and order, conflict or solidarity. Thus, every 12 years, there’s the same question: will the journey succeed?
Directors
Kesang Tseten
A writer and filmmaker, Kesang Tseten Lama's original screenplay Mukundo (Mask of Desire) was awarded the Best Script Award from the Nepal Motion Pictures Association, and the film was the Academy Award selection from Nepal in 2001. He also wrote the original screenplay KARMA in 2004 and wrote and co-directed Listen to the Wind, a film for adolescents for the South Asia Masculinities Project. He was featured in University of Hawaii's Manoa Journal's focus on Nepali writing and contributing co-editor of An Other Voice: English Writing from Nepal, published by Martin Chautari. Lama earned a Masters degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a Bachelor's from Amherst College in Asian Studies.