Ajitpal Singh’s Fire in the Mountains that recently played at the Sundance Film Festival, is a strong, sensitively drawn debut feature. A powerfully feminist film, it played in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section. Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s debut documentary Writing with Fire, on the quietly courageous, all-Dalit-women-run newspaper Khabar Lahariya (News Waves), in UP, won two World Cinema Documentary Awards at Sundance—the Special Jury Award for Impact for Change and Audience Award. Singh’s earlier short Rammat-Gammat (My Best Friend’s Shoes) won a Special Mention from the Children’s Jury at Oberhausen in 2018. He was Associate Director on Shanker Raman’s Gurgaon, and dialogue writer for Kanwal Sethi’s Indo-German co-production Once Again.

Fire in the Mountains is essentially about the clash between modernity and tradition, set in the picturesque Himalayas in Uttarakhand. It opens with Chandra (Vinamrata Rai), enticing tourists to her homestay “Swizerland” (no ‘t’), quietly fobbing off other aggressive touts, and effortlessly carrying the family’s heavy suitcases uphill. Chandra also carries the burden of raising the entire family alone and with a smile—her good-for-nothing husband Dharam (Chandan Bisht), a physically-challenged son Prakash who cannot walk, and daughter Kanchan. She keeps the homestay going, cuts grass, does the cooking, laboriously takes her son up and down the hill daily on her back, for treatment and school. As Chandra struggles to save money, and chases various people to cure Prakash, as well as to build a road past their home, that would make life so much easier, she is exploited by various men. Her boorish husband is furious when she pays for medical treatment to cure Prakash; he wants to invest her savings in a jagar, a religious ritual, instead.