Mashan

Mashan is a 2015 Nepali movie directed by the veteran actor-director Nir Shah and presented under the Nir Cinema banner. The film is an ambitious art cinema project: rather than a commercial script written for the screen, it is an adaptation of the famous Nepali play "Masan" written by the celebrated poet and playwright Gopal Prasad Rimal, whose works, such as "Aamako Sapana", and this drama, helped open a new era in Nepali literature. The play was taught as a choice in schools and colleges in Nepal and India for several years.

The story of the play is set in the late Rana era in Nepal's society and looks into the life of a traditional priestly high-caste Hindu household. The protagonist is Krishna, an educated young man of the family, whose story points at the very painful arrangement of a second marriage: his first wife, Helen, has no children, and because she remains childless she suffers the unfair social stigma that women in such families have to face — it was she who pushes Krishna and for his second wedding with the young Dulahi. The play thus exposes how the shame falling on an unmarried woman destroys the two main female characters of the drama while the men bear the social judgement.

For the cinema version, the cast was led by Raj Ballav Koirala and Keki Adhikari, along with Nita Dhungana, with Nir Shah himself acting in the film. The movie attempts to bring the universe of the original play to a modern audience with a cinematic and slightly darker tone which is why the film was broadly described as an art film when it was announced.

Mashan is therefore a film of its own style among the Nepali feature films that newer at the time, benefiting from a highly rated cast, a living classic of the Nepali literature, and no wonder is a welcome title for art-house lovers of the country's cinema. The full movie is available on YouTube.