Nepali Drama Pairing a Grandmother's Stories With AI Seeks Final Funding in Tokyo

A Nepali feature that places a grandmother's oral stories alongside the growth of artificial intelligence is hoping to premiere at Cannes in 2027. "Shirjara: Song of Grandmother," directed by Bikash Subedi, has completed principal photography and is now at the Tokyo Gap-Financing Market, where its team is trying to raise the final $44,000 it needs.

The film is described as a speculative drama. It moves between the traditional culture of the high Himalayas and a modern world shaped by technology. At its center is a question about what the people who build learning machines might gain from the knowledge of their ancestors, knowledge that has been preserved outside written archives and digital databases.

Subedi traced the idea to his childhood. "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.

Later, living among screens and data, he began to wonder why so much effort goes into teaching machines to understand people when humans still have so much to learn about themselves. The film grew out of that question. "For me, this is a personal journey from the motherboard back to the marrow," Subedi said.

Filming took place at roughly 4,000 meters in Dhorpatan, Nepal, using the Arri Alexa 35 camera. The team has put together an 80-minute rough cut. Producer Subash Bhusal of Kingdom Network Pvt. Ltd. said the altitude brought genuine logistical difficulties. "But we believed the story was worth the effort," he said.

The total budget is $296,000, and Kingdom Network has already raised and spent 85% of it. The remaining 15% is meant for finishing work: DI color grading, picture finishing, the master DCP, and a custom six-minute sequence combining AI and visual effects. That sequence is linked to what Subedi calls his AnI Cinema, short for Ancestral Intelligence.

Subedi said his approach is not hostile to technology. "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," he said.

In Tokyo, the filmmakers are looking for Japanese partners to join as co-producers and to handle post-production. They also want to find a sales company for international rights and distributors across Asia, with the aim of launching the film at Cannes in 2027. Bhusal said backing the project was a chance to support a filmmaker with a distinct perspective and "to bring a deeply rooted Nepali story into a wider international conversation."

Subedi is already developing the next entry in his AnI Cinema movement, a project about ancient trans-Himalayan trade routes and memory across time. Kingdom Network also has other Asian projects in development, each rooted in a specific local culture. The Tokyo Gap-Financing Market takes place as part of TIFFCOM, the content market linked to the Tokyo International Film Festival.