Official selection kathmandu international mountain film festival

Feature length documentary offical selected for Kathmandu International Film Festival 2024.

At one level, Into the Heart of the Mountain follows clinicians of Nomads Clinic on its annual medical pilgrimage, which has been undertaken for four decades, to Humla in northwestern Nepal, as they follow trails and cross passes of more than 18.000 feet with spectacular mountains in the background. It documents their efforts to bring urgent medical care to the people of this secluded mountain region, home to the spiritual, pre-Buddhist, Bon culture. At another level the film portrays a people who so far have managed to preserve their social, cultural, economic and political integrity. But climate change together with their struggle for rights to their ancestral, nomadic lands and natural resources are undermining the very fabric of their existence. The film is also the story of Zen Buddhist spiritual leader Roshi Joan Halifax, who created Nomads Clinic and is the narrator of the documentary, as she grapples with the layers of deception and of gender-based violence as well as pervasive misogyny that have shaped her life.