Manakamana

High above Nepal's mountainous landscape, a cable car carries pilgrims, villagers and tourists to the ancient Hindu temple of the goddess Manakamana. Once a multi-day pilgrimage, the journey now takes minutes. Filmed entirely inside the cars, Manakamana captures intimate conversations, revealing a society suspended between ritual tradition and technological change.

Pacho Velez: 'When I was a student at CalArts, I directed quite a bit of theatre, and I was intrigued by the "doubleness" of acting — actors' studied non-attention to their audience. This interest carries over for me into Manakamana — I'm watching the subjects' awareness of their world, and how it shifts to acknowledge the passing landscape, other passengers, and private thoughts, before occasionally, obliquely returning to the camera, which is so clearly staring at them, yet is never explicitly addressed. These switches between different sorts of focus are crucial because they create the pace of the individual shots, which in turn creates the rhythm of the entire film. To make edits in the shots would have imposed another sort of rhythm on top of the material, obscuring these internal cadences. Our pace of editing was glacial. The final film has only eleven shots, but it took us eighteen months of editing to arrive at it, which works out to our deciding on one shot every forty days or so.’

Stephanie Spray: 'Contrary to what many assume, Pacho and I were both inside the 5'×5' cable car along with our riders; we didn't simply send them off alone; this would have been technically almost impossible and wouldn't have created the same tensions — between avowal or disavowal of the camera, and the different degrees of complicity, indifference, and discomfiture it engenders. […] The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is frequently murky, and the documentary engagement with the real is found across genres, but extremely hard to get on film, since most film subjects slip into becoming someone other than themselves, self-conscious representations, even if they are not purportedly acting. In Manakamana, the trip itself is surreal; passengers are propelled above a jungle in Nepal, en route to a temple inhabited by a goddess who demands blood sacrifice. Most passengers have never been in aeroplanes, and the time aloft can be frightening and exhilarating. This detachment it bestows upon the journey for the passengers heightens the sense that this world is fictional, for it is indeed a manufactured and unnatural experience for most of them.’