After the Snowmelt review – a fatal disaster in a snowstorm leads to devastating act of remembrance

A work of deep personal reckoning, Yi-Shan Lo’s debut documentary feature opens with closeups of the film-maker’s own footsteps as she trudges through a snowbound landscape. Her jagged movement mirrors the rugged trajectory of the film itself, which grapples with a harrowing tragedy. In 2017, Lo was about to join her best friends Chun and Yueh on their hiking trip across Nepal when she came down with a sudden illness; she decided to stay behind while the other two carried on. Disaster struck: the pair went missing during a heavy snowstorm and were not found for more than 40 days. Yueh survived, but Chun died from lack of food coupled with hypothermia.

Struggling to make sense of these events, Lo painstakingly retraces the days leading up to and during her friends’ disappearance. She pores over old text messages, Chun’s diaries and footage captured by the Nepali rescue team. These materials shed some light on the ordeal, as well as the pair’s backgrounds. Diving into her personal archive, Lo recalls her burgeoning friendship with Chun at their Catholic girls’ school, where the latter defiantly resisted the institution’s rigid dress codes. Considering Chun’s efforts to express his non-conforming identity and his use of male pronouns, it is even more devastating that he was repeatedly misgendered in death by various news reports.

Revelatory as they might be, these artefacts appear insubstantial next to the weight of grief. In the second half of the film, Lo physically returns to the trail of the fateful trek. As digital screens and paper scraps give way to the vistas of babbling brooks and verdant hills, film-making emerges as a cathartic gesture of remembrance. Through Lo’s lens, the cave where Chun and Yueh took shelter ceases only to be a site of trauma, but a shrine to the memories of their love.