White Sun

After learning of his father's death, anti-regime partisan Chandra returns home to a remote mountain village, following ten years of civil war. The little girl Pooja is anxiously awaiting the man she believes to be her father, but gets jealous when Chandra arrives accompanied by a street orphan, rumored to be his son. Chandra´s brother Suraj, who fought for the monarchy during the civil war, refuses to carry their late father with Chandra. Under pressure from the village elders, Chandra must seek help from outside the village, to honor the strict caste and gender traditions he has fought to see an end to.

White Sun is powerful and significant and one the few quality films from Nepal courageous enough to tackle the civil war that ravaged the country between 1996 and 2006. The film has been selected for the Orizzonti section of the current Venice International Film Festival.

Deepak Rauniyar (b. 1978) had his feature film debut with Highway at the Berlinale in 2012, which simultaneously made it the first Nepali movie ever to be screened at a major international film festival. His second feature film,White Sun, is, in Rauniyar's own words, a story about the weight of the past on the Nepali present, and a reflection of his own experiences during a decade-long war, and the ongoing peace process.