Panchayat is a 2017 Nepali political drama film written and directed by Shivam Adhikari, and produced by Sushanta Shrestha and Shankar Shrestha under the banner of Kalavati Films, in association with NepalFlix and Hetauda Movies. The film was released in theaters in 2017, with the director making his debut as a feature filmmaker. It is set in the era of the forbidden era of Nepali history, the Panchayat administration, which ruled the country for three decades, and its title directly suggests the system that the movie attempts to bring the audiences with on screen.

The story of the film is set in a village in the Panchayat era, where the effects of the state apparatus, the local authority of the dandies, the landlords, and the power of the regime are felt. It traces the life of a family and the village of the era, the unfulfilled students, restrictions on the freedom of press and speech, and the system of class differences of Nepali village life. The woman of the film Neetta Dhungana and the cast returns villagers who quietly question the limitations of the era.

The film seeks to interpret the past under the leadership of a government and tells a journey through the days of the regime: it shows the influence of the part of the evolution, fright and illusion of society. The film tries to show how a system is enforced through power and how people go on to survive by smiling at the rules of the Panchayat, and it demonstrates a mild but critical view of that representation.

The cast of the film includes Neeta Dhungana, Saroj Khanal, Rupa Rana, Ganesh Giri, Jahanwi Sharma, Bishal and other known artists of the Nepali stage and screen, and it earned a fair distribution on the release. The film is worth watching as a cinematic snapshot that tries to capture a valuable part of the national past for the younger generations. It holds an educational and dramatic value and achieved the state of national cinema that asks its audience to remember, acknowledge, and respect the disputed past of Nepal.

Panchayat is a modest-budget national political drama boldly arousing the topic of the most sensitive historical periods of the country, and giving a lesson for the society that memory, whether political or private, is constructed by cinema and by the people who lived it.