Bimal: The Snow is Singing was born from my own lived experience and deep research—growing up as someone whose people breathed without air, stood without land, and saw through eyes that lacked hope. This story is not imagined; it is embodied. It flows from the raw, unfiltered truth of the Bhutanese refugee journey—one that is both specific and universal.
It is a story of people caught in an identity crisis, displacement, and a fight for dignity and human rights. It shows how the suffering of one person can ripple through generations—how infants and children inherit wounds they never caused. Across the world, too many children suffer in silence, and I felt a deep urgency to give voice to that silence.
Through absurd visual poetry and musical anatomy, the film transforms pain into song, darkness into melting snow, and displacement into a visual meditation on hope. The story lifts the voices of immigrants and addresses mental health, child psychology, and the power of acceptance. It rejuvenates the eyes with hope, the feet with land, and the breath with air. The pain of the past becomes a silent song in the night, gradually transforming into melting, warm, white snow.
Trauma and hope, past and present—these are unavoidable phenomena of humankind. This film embraces both. What makes it unique is its narrative form. My journey in theatre has always been rooted in socio-political content and experimentation with form. The legacy I have built continues through this film, offering an organic and fresh experience to the spectator.
For me, this story needed to be told. It had to be told by me, in this way, and at this moment.
Bimal: The entire filmmaking process was organic, unique, and transformative. It began as a theatre therapy workshop. In these sessions, participants unearthed their pasts—at times breaking down, becoming aggressive, or simply overwhelmed by the rawness of what they were revealing. Slowly, through the process, they reached a state of calm and clarity, learning to share their stories with compassion.
What started as a journey toward mental health evolved into an off-Broadway musical theatre production and later transformed into this film. We conducted many interviews and case studies, working closely as a group. For the first time, people from different generations and backgrounds—who had fled Bhutan, lived in camps in Nepal, and resettled in the U.S.—sat together, laughed together, cried together, and began to heal together.
Many said they hadn’t spoken of their trauma in decades—not even to their families. The displacement fractured not just homes but also relationships, identities, and values. This collective storytelling process helped bring those lost histories back to life with truth and dignity.
Bimal: I’ve been fortunate to live a life that stretches from the raw soil of pre-democratic Nepal—where stories were passed down by firelight and life moved with the rhythm of the land—to the structured, intellectual traditions of Indian theatre, and the experimental, avant-garde art stages of Europe.
This journey—rooted in one world and expanding into many—has shaped not only how I tell stories but how I perceive life itself.
My training across continents allowed me to dismantle conventional boundaries between society and art. Theatre became more than performance—it became a lens to explore politics, anthropology, silence, and community. After 20 years of continuous practice, I’ve developed my own form of storytelling: what I call “perspective realism” or “theatrical realism.” It’s not bound by convention or medium. It breathes beyond the surface—sometimes raw, sometimes heightened.
My canvas is not just the stage or the screen. It’s memory, ritual, shadow, and space—a barefoot walk across time. That’s why this film feels different. It lives between forms. Spectators will experience both the breath of live theatre and the intimacy of cinema.
It is deeply rooted in our narrative traditions yet speaks a language the world can understand. The film is experimental in form but organic in feeling. It carries the precision of European training, the depth of South Asian dramaturgy, and the pulse of my ancestral soil. That is what makes my work—and this film—unique.
Bimal: I explored this contrast through irony, dark humor, and symbolic imagery.
On the surface, Bhutan is portrayed as a spiritual paradise—measured by Gross National Happiness and wrapped in harmony. But beneath that glossy image lies a silenced history of the Lhotshampa people: displacement, torture, statelessness, and cultural erasure.
This contradiction lies at the heart of the film. Just as world diplomacy is often performative, so is the crafted image of Bhutan. What is shown is rarely what is lived.
The film investigates what lies beneath national narratives. I use the metaphor of clothing: instead of protecting, it conceals violence, covers wounds, and distorts truth. Across the world, atrocities are wrapped in the language of development and peace—Bhutan included, perhaps more so.
The film exposes that gloss. It shows how horror can be dressed in beauty, how suffering is edited out of history. Through visual poetry and absurd humor, I tried to show that the silence isn’t accidental—it is intentional, crafted.
Bimal: I hope audiences leave not just moved, but awakened.
The film invites them into the world of people who have carried exile on their backs—physically, mentally, emotionally. Who have breathed without air, walked without land, and dreamed without permission. And yet, they endure. They remember. They resist.
The emotional weight is real, but it’s not meant to leave the viewer in despair. Instead, it opens the heart to empathy—to the recognition of pain that may not be visible. Through that empathy, I hope audiences find acceptance: of difference, of imperfection, of complexity.
Ultimately, I hope they walk away with a grounded sense of hope—the kind that allows us to coexist despite borders and beliefs.
In a world divided by identity and judgment, this story asks: Can we hold space for each other’s truths without needing to agree? Can we sit in silence, in grief, in laughter—without fear?
If they leave the theater more open, more awake, more gentle toward those they don’t understand, then the story has done its work. It may not move directly, but it stirs deeply—evoking a Brechtian, distanced, yet embodied emotional response. The film gently appeals against cultural genocide and ethnic cleansing, and it ignites the flame of awakening.
Bimal: My process is deeply collaborative and often begins with theatre workshops. Actors revisit their lived experiences, allowing their performances to emerge organically—full of raw, embodied emotion.
I don’t merely block scenes—I choreograph energy, space, and psychological distance, just as I would in theatre.
In theatre, we practice both intimacy and distance. Sometimes, the actor invites the audience into their world; at other times, they reach out across the stage. In cinema, we tend to present everything directly—every detail, every breath. In this film, I merged both approaches: offering stillness and invitation, while also using cinematic intimacy to reveal what lies beneath the surface.
I continue to practice a theatre that blends the rootedness of land and nature with the pulse of technology. This film bridges those realms—screen and stage—moving fluidly between them.
Bimal: Working with non-actors was both profoundly difficult and extraordinarily beautiful. They weren’t just portraying characters—they were embodying their own histories. This wasn’t performance—it was presence.
They brought their wounds, their silences, their forgotten songs. The challenge was to hold that space ethically and artistically—never to exploit their pain, but to transform it.
This film wasn’t created in a moment. It was a long, evolving journey that began with theatre therapy, moved into an off-Broadway musical, and eventually became cinema. The participants evolved too, as did their fragmented lives—slowly reassembling into a new sense of self and voice.
We didn’t edit out their broken timelines—we embraced them. What moved me most was watching them bloom—from silence to strength, from trauma to tenderness. Each frame holds not just a scene, but a soul reclaiming space.
The beauty lies in this alchemy: when real people step into their own stories, not to entertain but to exist fully. This is not just art—it is survival, resistance, and quiet revolution.
Bimal: The transformation.
The transformation of the story, of the form, of the actors and the characters—and the selves they carried. Lived memories dissolved into imagery, as if their past had always been a performance of their own history.
Sometimes, it felt like life itself was echoing through them on screen.
The child protagonist’s real world melted into the imagined until we could no longer tell which was real and which was dreamed. The imagined became lived. The lived became mythical.
What remains with me is the emotional rollercoaster—the slow, deep transformation we all underwent. Eyes that once stared into a lost horizon began to look forward again, filled with warmth.
What began in silence became song. What seemed like rigidity revealed resilience.
This wasn’t just about making a film. It was about bearing witness to transformation in its most human form. And after 15 years of living with this content, this project has transformed me too—in countless ways.