Nepal - 15 - Watching Slumdog Millionaire

February 3rd 2009

Could you find a more amazing place for a cinema?

When people talk about great places to watch a film, I'm not sure they can really compete with where we just watched Slumdog Millionaire. We've been walking the Annapurna circuit in the Himalayas in Nepal and arrived in Manang, 3500m above sea level. We arrived, tired from 5 days of walking to discover that the village has a small cinema called 'High Vision Hall' set up by some forward thinking locals so that they and tourists can watch films that are posted into the area on DVD. How the post gets there is another world from that of postal systems in other parts of the world. Manang is about 60km as the crow flies from the nearest major town, Pokhara. This doesn't sound far, but unfortunately there are some of the highest mountains in the world directly in the way, Annapurna I,II,III & IV, Gangapurna, Nilgiri, Tilicho Peak, Machapuchere. A dirt road snakes it's way along the Kali Gandaki river valley between Daulgiri and Nilgiri to within about 20km of Manang. The drive takes about 10 hours. The only problem after that is the final walk that involves climbing 2700m over one of the highest passes in the region, the 5400m Thorung La. There is another route, although that also involves a tortuous days drive from Kathmandu on a bus, a 4 hour jeep drive and 5 days of walking from the village of Syange at the end of the road. The track is often blocked by landslides and when we got the jeep into the area, a large boulder blocked the road so we couldn't even get all the way to Syange. We'd downloaded the Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo film review show from BBC Radio 5, and listened in Kathmandu to the good doctor's enthusiastic review of the film. We were pissed off that we'd have to wait until we arrived in the UK in July to watch it on DVD, but when we saw this little cinema in Manang we asked excitedly if they had Slumdog Millionaire...amazingly they had a slightly less than legal copy that had just arrived but was already rented out for the night. We booked the cinema for the following night, not really knowing what to expect. After a day exploring the mountains, we rushed back down to Manang for our 5pm showing, bought our Coke's and pop corn, paid our 200 Rupee entrance fee and entered an incredible little room with space for about 40 people sat on wooden benches covered in small squares of Yak fur in a gently sloping room. At the back of the room was a data projector connected to a small computer and a 4m wide screen hung at the front.

January in Manang is extremely cold once the sun goes down and each morning we would wake up to frozen water in the buckets in the toilets with ice maybe 4cm thick. We wore ALL the clothes we had with us, I had a hat, thermals, gloves and also the hood on my pile jacket was done up like a Snorkel coat and we all sat as close as we could to the small stove fuelled by yak dung in the middle of the cinema. It never really did much more than take a little of the chill out of the room, the temperature hovering around freezing at best.

For the next 2 hours we all sat in silence mesmerised by an outstanding story, direction and cinematography, and the excellent MIA songs on the soundtrack. Even the hard wooden bench felt luxurious with it's yak skin covering. I even sat through the excellent end credits, although most of my fellow cinema-goers had by then run down the main street in the pitch black back to their lodges for the warmth of the wood-burning stoves. For me it always feels a bit sudden to walk out immediately a film finishes, although when I looked around to discover that I was the only one left watching the dance routines, and that even my wife had vanished to have a much needed wee behind the 'cinema', I realised how absolutely engrossing the film had been. I hobbled back to the lodge and then had the longest wee of my life (and I know because I timed it – an old habit whenever I'm desperate!). Altitude makes it essential to drink loads of fluid and 108 seconds after I started weeing I finally stopped flowing. I suspect that it was a world record and reflected how absolutely captivating Slumdog Millionaire had been. My previous record had been 82 seconds and this marked a major improvement.

Manang perched above the river valley at 3500m above sea level

Now I know that the showing of the film was less than legal but everyone there will go and see the film in a cinema if they get the chance, or buy or rent the DVD. For the guys who've made the 'cinema' and invested in the projector and laptop it's one of the few ways that they can make money apart from working as porters or leaving for the cities. The quality of the picture was what you expect from a 720 pixels wide screen, spread over 4m but it didn't matter, the whole evening was absolutely magic and I'll be surprised if there's a better setting for a cinema anywhere on earth. Have you ever seen a film in a better location? If the 'Good Doctor' reads this, having listened to his description of coffee fascism (Americano, frappacinos etc.) and the near impossibility of just asking for a cup of coffee, black or white, I would like to report that I refuse to order anything but a filter or espresso coffee and am often faced with confused staff who can't find my order on their till. 'Do you mean Americano?' I'd like to add an extra area for discussion on the show on a similar theme: EGGS Over easy, sunny side up, over medium? When did the world become infected with this nonsense? What can be done about it? © Simon Taylor 2009