Film Screening: Kanchenjunga

FILM SYNOPSIS
Shot across a span of more than 12 years and filmed in over 10 countries, Kanchenjunga is a poetic, deeply political documentary-essay that traces the intimate entanglements between labor, memory, and visual power. Set between the fog-laced tea plantations of Darjeeling and the war-torn hills of South Lebanon, the film follows the filmmaker’s personal and political journey to understand a single image: a smiling tea plucker in a blue dress.
What begins as a search for the woman in the photograph unfolds into a meditation on photography, violence, generational survival, and the ethics of seeing. Combining observational footage, personal narration, archival fragments, and stylized visual sequences, the film confronts how images aestheticize suffering, how memory is inherited, and how labor, especially by women, is rendered invisible by systems of capital and empire.
The narrative moves through various cinematic languages: from ethnographic realism to poetic essay, from family history to global critique. The film is structured like the tea leaf itself, plucked in one geography, processed in another, consumed in yet another, revealing a chain of interconnected lives and histories.
At its core, Kanchenjunga is a confrontation with the image itself. The mountain: elusive and omnipresent becomes both metaphor and mirror. This is a film about what we choose to frame, what we fail to see, and what happens when the camera turns inward.

ON THE FILMMAKERFounder of Antswood art hub in 2016, Ghassan Saleh boasts a wealth of experience as an architect, writer, and a filmmaker.
Currently based in Germany, brings over a decade of expertise spanning architecture, design, research, and anthropology. His ongoing explorations in visual anthropology address questions of representation, diverse perspectives of seeing, the transformative character of travel, and the impact of ethnographic practice on photography and storytelling.
As a filmmaker, Saleh’s work moves fluidly between poetic documentary, experimental cinema, and ethnographic film. His feature-length documentary Kangchenjunga (2016–2025, in production) spans twelve years and ten countries, reflecting on perception, capitalism, and the paradoxes of human existence. Other works include FYAL: Two Anthropologists in Search of a Tribe (2021), a playful experimental short on identity and subculture; A Concrete Memory (2021), a poetic excavation of memory screened at the Riga Pasaules Film Festival; and The Kiss (2020), a lyrical short co-directed with Marcel Saleh, weaving together Nepal’s earthquake aftermath and Lebanon’s postwar scars. His earlier visual projects, such as Seven Years in India, highlight his ongoing photographic and philosophical engagement with travel and cultural encounters.

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Host or Publisher Indian Alliance Paris