Nepali cinema’s melodramatic realism

Taken in totality, Nepali mainstream cinema concerns itself with a specific ideological inclination, a tendency towards ‘melodramatic realism’.

Disguised as social realism, this is cinema of affirmation cloaked in the language of critique. This tendency is not indigenous but inherited: a diluted echo and imitation of Bollywood. 

Film directors, driven by the understandable desire for commercial viability, have adopted Bollywood's worst tendencies: its emotional maximalism and narrative predictability. But they have done so without the budget, without its system, without its technicality.

The result is cinema that mimics form without function. The cinematography with its saturated colour and glamour-obsessed image is an aesthetic colonisation. Let us name it what it is: a cinema of sympathy.

Social injustice is not interrogated but assumed. Suffering is not resisted but aestheticised. Characters do not struggle to change the world, they endure it. They are saints in ragged clothes, martyrs in the mountains, whose nobility lies in their passivity. In this cinema, pain is purity, and purity is always poor.

These films are said to reflect contemporary society—but they do so in the way a mirror reflects a dream: distorted, beautified, bathed in the light of sentimentalism. They portray not society as it is, but as it feels to remember. What we have, then, is not realism, but a kind of sentimental mythos.

The culprits are not hard to find. They are the most celebrated directors of our time. Their films win national awards, their actors become stars. Yet what unites them all — from rural dramedies like Kabaddi, family melodramas like Prasad, or soft-issue social parables like Saili — is a fundamental conservatism of narrative logic. 

If there is politics, it is personal. If there is history, it is just the setting. Society, in these films, is static. The caste system, the labour exodus, gendered violence, these are presented as conditions of nature, not conditions of power. To suffer within them is to be good, to fight against them would be, it seems, impolite.

What defines this tendency is its inability to dramatise complexity. The films are either naively dualistic or neurotically symbolic. Women are either goddesses or ghosts. Men are either stoic heroes or cartoonish predators. The poor are noble. The rich are cruel. Nothing is ambiguous. Nothing is difficult. Nothing is allowed to breathe.

Most insidious is the rise of populist humour, that soft, crowd-pleasing comedy which diffuses even the most tragic premises, like a nervous laugh at a funeral. Laughter that is not disruptive. 

This humour, often rooted in exaggerated dialect, village caricature, or romantic incompetence, serves to neutralise discomfort. It appears not only in comedies but in ‘social drama’, where it functions as an emotional pressure valve. A girl is nearly sold into marriage — but wait, here comes the lovable drunk uncle with a one-liner. 

The humour, while infectious , mocks just the symptoms like arranged marriage and patriarchal values, but not the structures themselves. There is no class struggle here, only romantic miscommunication. When misogyny appears, it is played for laughs, when caste lines emerge, they're side-stepped in favour of musical reconciliation. 

Politicians are corrupt, yes, but hilariously so. Systemic failure is rendered absurd, not grotesque. Their jokes are universal. But in avoiding discomfort, they also avoid depth. They laugh with the people, not for them.

But why are we laughing? And what are we laughing at? If the answer is that we are laughing without bitterness and rage, at our own condition, then our cinema is no longer a mirror but a lullaby.

Even stylistically, the image is clean but unimaginative, the dialogue is moralistic, almost liturgical. The endings are too often redemptive, even when they pretend to be tragic. One watches these films not to be challenged, but to be comforted: to be reminded that pain is meaningful, that goodness suffers, that, in the end, Nepal is still beautiful.

But cinema is not therapy. It is not the job of film to make pain feel poetic. To reduce our political and economic trauma to matters of individual heartbreak is not just aesthetically lazy, it is dangerous. This is how ideology works: not through propaganda, but through sentiment. 

The films, by making injustice feel tragic instead of intolerable, teach audiences not to resist reality, but to accept it. 

This is not to say that all cinema is compromised. There are filmmakers, few but growing—who refuse the consolation of melodrama, like Min Bahadur Bham's The Black Hen, and Sujit Bidari's Butterfly on the Windowpane, which create spaces of silence, of interiority. Their characters are not metaphors, but people. Their conflicts are not tidy, their resolutions are not redemptive. In short, they resist the tendency.

But these exceptions only highlight the rule. The mainstream appetite, whether among producers or the public, still favours the emotionally saturated, the morally clear and the forced humour. 

"Show Nepal," they say. "Make it cry. Make it real. But not too real."

What has become of anger in our cinema? What has become of satire, irony, provocation? Where are the films that disrupt rather than reflect? That confront the audience, rather than embrace them? 

If art is meant to mirror society, then what society are we mirroring? A quiet one, perhaps, a stoic one, a beautiful one. But not a just one.

This is the paradox of our cinema: in trying so hard to reflect the people, it forgets to challenge them. In trying to represent suffering, it aestheticises it. In trying to honour tradition, it enshrines conservatism.

Cinema should not be devotional. It should not be a hymn. It must be a question. And until directors begin to ask those questions — not in press kits, but in the language of cinema itself — we will remain, for all fanfare and film festivals, a national cinema without a national consciousness.  

Abishek Budhathoki is a multidisciplináry artist specialising in media and mass culture. He has directed a number of short films and has also worked on feature films and documentaries.