Nepali Film 'Shirjara' Seeks Final $44,000 in Tokyo

Director Bikash Subedi needs $44,000 to finish "Shirjara: Song of Grandmother," a Nepali Himalayan drama that pits a grandmother's oral storytelling against the rise of artificial intelligence. The film has wrapped principal photography and is pitching for its final funds at the Tokyo Gap-Financing Market, part of TIFFCOM, the content market attached to the Tokyo International Film Festival.

The numbers are concrete. The feature carries a total budget of $296,000. Producer Subash Bhusal of Kingdom Network Pvt. Ltd. says the company has already raised and spent 85% of it, leaving a 15% gap for finishing. That money will cover DI color grading (the digital color correction pass), picture finishing, the master DCP (the theatrical delivery format), and a custom six-minute AI and VFX sequence. The team has assembled an 80-minute rough cut.

The shoot itself was a logistical feat. It took place at roughly 4,000 meters in Dhorpatan, Nepal, shot on the Arri Alexa 35 camera. "But we believed the story was worth the effort," Bhusal said of the altitude-driven hurdles.

What is the film actually about?

Subedi describes "Shirjara" as a speculative drama that moves between the traditional culture of the high Himalayas and a modern world shaped by technology. Its central question: what might people building learning machines gain from ancestral knowledge — knowledge kept alive outside written archives and digital databases?

The premise comes from Subedi's own life. "My earliest memories are of sitting beside an old hearth in the high Himalayas, listening to my grandmother tell stories. She was around 90 years old, and those moments left a deep impression on me," he said.

As an adult surrounded by screens and data, he began asking why so much effort goes into teaching machines to understand people while humans still have so much to learn about themselves. He frames the film bluntly: "For me, this is a personal journey from the motherboard back to the marrow."

What does the AI piece actually mean?

Subedi calls his approach AnI Cinema — short for Ancestral Intelligence. The six-minute AI and VFX sequence in the finishing budget belongs to that concept. He is quick to deflect any anti-technology reading.

"I am not against technology. I am interested in what happens when we bring technology into a deeper conversation with our own history and humanity," Subedi said.

What does the Tokyo market change for the film?

The Tokyo trip has three goals. The team wants Japanese partners on board as co-producers and for post-production work. It hopes to sign a sales company for international rights. And it is looking for distributors across Asia, with an eye on launching the film at Cannes in 2027.

Bhusal frames the producer's bet in terms of voice and reach. "For us, supporting 'Shirjara' was an opportunity to back a filmmaker with a distinct perspective and to bring a deeply rooted Nepali story into a wider international conversation," he said.

There's a pipeline behind this single title. Subedi is already developing the next installment in his AnI Cinema movement, a project about ancient trans-Himalayan trade routes and memory across time. Kingdom Network also has further projects from Asia in development, each grounded in a specific local culture. If "Shirjara" closes its gap in Tokyo, it becomes both a finished film and the proof of concept for a wider slate.