Ancestral Memory Meets AI in Himalayan Drama ‘Shirjara: Song of Grandmother’ at Tokyo Gap-Financing Market

A Himalayan drama that sets a grandmother’s stories against the rise of artificial intelligence is aiming for a Cannes premiere next year.

Director Bikash Subedi’s Nepali feature “Shirjara: Song of Grandmother” has wrapped principal photography and is at the Tokyo Gap-Financing Market to raise its last $44,000.

Described as a speculative drama, the film moves between the traditional culture of the high Himalayas and a modern world shaped by technology. Its central question is what people building learning machines might gain from the knowledge of their ancestors – knowledge kept alive outside written archives and digital databases.

“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,” Subedi said.

As an adult surrounded by screens and data, he began asking why so much effort goes into teaching machines to understand people while humans still have so much to learn about themselves. That question gave rise to the film. “For me, this is a personal journey from the motherboard back to the marrow,” Subedi said.

The shoot took place at roughly 4,000 meters in Dhorpatan, Nepal, on the Arri Alexa 35, and the team has assembled an 80-minute rough cut.

Producer Subash Bhusal of Kingdom Network Pvt. Ltd. said the altitude created real logistical hurdles. “But we believed the story was worth the effort,” Bhusal said.

The film carries a total budget of $296,000. Kingdom Network has already raised and spent 85% of it, leaving a 15% gap for finishing. That money will cover DI color grading, picture finishing, the master DCP and a custom six-minute AI and VFX sequence tied to what Subedi calls his AnI Cinema, short for Ancestral Intelligence.

“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,” Subedi said.

In Tokyo, the team wants to bring Japanese partners on board as co-producers and for post work. It also hopes to sign a sales company to handle international rights and to find distributors across Asia, with an eye on launching the film at Cannes in 2027.

“For us, supporting ‘Shirjara’ was an opportunity to back a filmmaker with a distinct perspective and to bring a deeply rooted Nepali story into a wider international conversation,” Bhusal said.

Subedi is already developing the next installment in his AnI Cinema movement, a project about ancient trans-Himalayan trade routes and memory across time. Kingdom Network also has further projects from Asia in development, each grounded in a specific local culture.

The Tokyo Gap-Financing Market runs as part of TIFFCOM, the content market attached to the Tokyo International Film Festival.