GOLDEN MIRROR
documentary feature – work in progress
“I said: Many fairies wander in these mountains, how must they look? She said: They’re Khandromas, they roam free. Those who wish to see, can see them.” Golden Mirror is an intimate encounter with the lives, dreams, desires and memories of the feminine skywalkers of Lahaul.
THE FILM
In Lahaul valley, a new tunnel carved through the mountains brings an unexpected influx of tourists, while an expanding glacial lake poses threat to several villages. After the wrathful deity Palden Lhamo warns the locals about the ecological disruptions, a woman filmmaker sets out on a journey to find personal and collective answers to the crisis unfolding in the valley. This search leads her in rediscovering Lahaul as the abode of khandromas or skywalkers, female spirits that inhabit natural elements such as waterfalls, mountain peaks, forests and caves, and who are believed to sometimes take human form. She finds herself in a monastery with two aging nuns, where she witnesses their invisible life of spiritual practice at the margins. Below the monastery, in a makeshift tin home by the road side, the filmmaker meets a young woman road worker, who has been breaking mountains, so roads can run through the valley. At home, ancient tales flow from her grandmother’s mouth about a future when rivers will run out of water. Along the journey, she then crosses paths with a painter, who too has been searching for khandromas, inviting them onto her canvas for many years. Their quests begin to intertwine. As she meets these women, the filmmaker wonders, are these khandromas as well? In what ways do they relate to the deity Palden Lhamo and her profound ability to foresee collective dangers? Guided by the filmmaker’s voice, in Golden Mirror Khandromas appear through different realms—across the skies, along mountain ridges and glaciers, into the rivers of Lahaul. Their steps summon a constellation of feminine acts and narrations: the nuns’ prayers, the road worker’s dreams of the future, the painter’s desires and slow alchemy of colours. All this entangles with folk tales, songs and poems about women’s invisibility in Lahaul. Between first person narration, documentary observation and sensorial imagery, the film will weave together the lives of these women and the living presence of khandromas in Lahaul valley. In Golden Mirror, dreams, myths, sacred and the profane collide in the desire of crafting a personal portrait of a home on the brink of erasure.
CONTEXT
Lahaul is a remote tribal valley in the northwestern Himalayas of India, enclosed by high mountain passes. Despite its remoteness, diverse ethno-linguistic tribal communities flourish here, practising a mix of Buddhism, Hinduism and animist traditions. Around the eleventh century, as the culture of pilgrimage began to emerge in Tibet, especially to India as the “holy land” of the Buddha Shakyamuni, early Tibetan pilgrims played a key role in projecting the northwestern Himalayas as part of the “twenty-four” tantric great seats (mahapīṭha). As these tantric practitioners physically traversed the Himalayas, Lahaul emerged as the abode of the dākinī or khandroma (skywalkers), the feminine spirits, with local oral histories in particular revealing the role of nonhuman and human khandromas in aiding spiritual realisations of the tantric yogins. For Lahaulis, khandromas not only continue to inhabit the landscape, they are the guiding forces who make themselves heard through their oracles. In these times of great uncertainty posed by modernity and weakening social relations, these Tantric female deities have been repeatedly warning about mass tourism and environmental pollution brought by the newly built 9 km long Atal tunnel. Central to Golden Mirror is Palden Lhamo, who inhabits a waterfall in Sissu, the filmmakers’ mother’s village, which is now endangered by the possible outburst of the Gepang Glacial lake.
RESEARCH AND ACCESS AND LANGUAGES
Our access to Lahaul and its local community is unique. In the past ten years, as a Lahauli, I have had the possibility to witness and document various aspects of life in Lahaul, along with my husband Carlo. We have filmed extensively during the winter season, when accessing the valley was extremely difficult. Before the opening of the new tunnel, the only way to travel to Lahaul in winter was by helicopter, due to the heavy snowfall on the Rohtang, a high altitude pass at 4000 meters. This long engagement in the region led to the filming of several community moments and winter rituals previously undocumented on camera, as well as everyday stories circulating within the intimate spaces of our extended family. The project has so far resulted in an ongoing PhD, various site‑specific video installations (in collaboration with Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation and Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art), academic and creative publications, workshops and community‑based events. A comprehensive list can be found on www.filminglahaul.it. This privileged access to the community, made possible by personal relationships and close networks built over the years, puts us in a unique position to share a deeply personal and informed gaze on Lahaul as an endangered, sacred, feminine Himalayan landscape. A unique feature of this project is its linguistic approach as it creatively engages some of the most endangered Western Himalayan dialects belonging to the Tibeto-Burmese language family. Apart from Hindi and Nepali, the languages involved are in fact Tinani (filmmaker’s mother language utilised for the voice over), Bunan (filmmaker’s grandmother’s language also utilised for the voice over) and Bhoti.
CHARACTERS
Krishna Tashi Palmo. A practitioner of the sacred Buddhist Thangka art from Lahaul, she has defied both societal and religious norms by carving out a space for herself as a woman artist with a disability. Krishna and Kesang share a deep friendship. In the film Krishna, as a painter, will echo the filmmaker’s presence. The two have collaborated on various artistic projects. Kesang has curated art exhibitions for Krishna with reputed independent artistic spaces in India, and has also directed a video installation about her practice as a thangka painter. They are currently also developing a book project together. Krishna is among the very few women thangka artists from Lahaul, and her contemporary works draw deeply on Lahaul as a feminine landscape. In the film, we will witness her own lived experience as an artist with a disability, and her inner conflicts and desires about representing Lahaul and its Khandromas on her canvas.
Thinley Angmo and Zangmo. In the male-dominated Buddhist monasteries of Lahaul, there are nuns like Thinley and Zangmo who have chosen a monastic path to escape the inequalities and sufferings of lay life, only to find themselves in the margins again. Thinley Angmo and Zangmo are two elderly Lahauli nuns, now in their nineties, who have silently pursued their spiritual paths with each other’s support. They have been together since the age of ten, and in the film, we see them sharing their everyday lives, friendship, and love as we encounter their unspoken stories of resistance.
Gudi. A thirty eight year old woman migrant worker from Nepal. She has been working on building roads for the Indian military in Lahaul. Every summer, Gudi leaves her family and children behind to travel to Lahaul, a place of sacrifice but also one where she feels a stronger sense of safety and freedom than in her own home. In the film, we will follow Gudi’s life as a road worker and hear her dreams, fears and expectations about the future.
Nani Ji. Kesang’s ninety year old grandmother, and a natural storyteller. In the film, we see Nani Ji narrate folk stories about water bodies as life‑givers, and recall the prophecies that her spiritual masters long ago made about Kaliyuga, the dark age that would befall Lahaul. We will film her as she tames the glacial water channels that irrigate the agricultural fields, amid water shortage and climate crisis in the Himalayas.
Palden Lhamo. An other-than-human character, she is the female spirit deity of several villages and families in Lahaul. She inhabits the sacred waterfall of Sissu, the filmmaker’s mother village, one of the villages that witnessed drastic socio-ecological change due to mass tourism and most threatened by the expansion of Gepang lake. Palden Lhamo is known for her wrathful character, and especially for unleashing her anger through natural phenomena like floods, cloudburst and landslides. In the last two years, through her oracle, she has repeatedly warned the villagers to put strict community‑based measures in place to control garbage and noise pollution resulting from uncontrolled tourism.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT
The first time we traveled together to Lahaul was in 2015. We were newly married. Kesang was returning to Lahaul after seven years of studying and working in Indian cities, wanting to document the environmental violations related to dam development in the valley. For Carlo, who had recently graduated from a documentary cinema course, that meant entering a completely new reality with the intent of visually supporting Kesang’s work. Soon enough, our individual practices began to gravitate towards a shared language where cinema and activism could collide. We realised we were in Lahaul at a time when the valley’s remote character was beginning to change, with locals eagerly anticipating the tunnel but also deeply anxious about the environmental impacts of connectivity. Our desire to portray Lahaul grew, leading us to spend long periods filming in the valley, interviewing diverse people and collecting folk songs and poems. Inspired by the works of filmmakers like Ben Russell and Trinh T. Minh-ha, among others, we tried to position ourselves as dwelling between first-person cinema, sensorial ethnography and feminist cinema. Over the years, we implemented different filming approaches, from durational to fast hand held shots, and built deep relationships with people we were filming. Kesang’s positionality as a woman from Lahaul naturally oriented towards exploring themes in and around womanhood in the valley. The triangulation between personal narrative, the cultural complexity of the landscape, and our unique access to previously visually undocumented rituals and moments sometimes made us feel trapped in a limbo, where any cinematic approach seemed not deep enough, incomplete, or at risk of commodifying what we were witnessing. With this vast audiovisual archive, in the past decade, we produced several visual essays, video installations, and designed interactive workshops in collaboration with the community in Lahaul. This experimental and fragmented interaction with our material helped us imagine a feature documentary structured around a common motif and a coherent storytelling thread: the feminine as it appears in the concept of the khandroma. These feminine spirits and energies inhabiting Lahaul were somehow present throughout our material—in the durational footage of different landscape elements, as well as in our female characters. The concept of khandroma began to resonate strongly with the life stories of women we had filmed in Lahaul, and with Kesang’s own memories as a Lahauli woman who had grown up listening to folk tales, poems and songs about motherhood and death. As these different elements came together, we witnessed how deeply the feminine bodies and the environment are intertwined. This unique perspective from which to address environmental change became even more evident when we witnessed the community’s practical response when Palden Lhamo, through her oracle, warned the locals about the environmental danger of mass tourism. We realised how care for the environment is inherent to indigenous beliefs and can lead to tangible political actions as we witnessed in Lahaul. To convey such a transforming space to local and global audiences, we decided to craft a first person narration, a film that attempts to provoke feminist retelling, solidarity, environmental sensibility and belonging from a cinematically underrepresented region of the world.
TEAM
Kesang Thakur (direction, research and script writing) is a researcher and video art practitioner from the trans-Himalayan Lahaul Valley, in Himachal Pradesh, India. She is the co-founder of Filming Lahaul, a cross media ethnography project that engages localised responses to socio-ecological transformations in the region. She is currently a PhD candidate with the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. Her doctoral research examines state infrastructures in the Indian Himalayas, with a particular focus on the geostrategic Atal Tunnel and its role in reshaping human and non-human relations and ethics of care for the environment in Lahaul. Her long-form writing and collaborative academic work have featured on platforms such as Himāl Southasian, The Wire, Dialogue Earth, SAGE, and Roadsides. In 2025, Kesang was the recipient of the Himalayan Fellowship for Creative practitioners, a year long grant by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) and Royal Enfield.
Carlo Ghidini (direction, camera and script writing) graduated in Disciplines of Arts, Music and Performance from the Faculty of Letter and Philosophy at the University of Padua, Italy. Thereafter, he obtained a Master in Documentary Practice at the Brunel University of London and a diploma in Interactive Documentary at the Cineteca di Bologna. Between 2011-2013, he was involved in the production and dissemination of independent documentaries with Magic Lantern Movies, Delhi. Since 2015, Carlo has been co-developing visual ethnography project Filming Lahaul, as well as engaging as a field producer and cinematographer for documentary productions platforms such as CNN and Reuters. He has also authored on-site and virtual video installations in Europe and India commissioned by platforms such as the London Review of Books or those displayed in venues such as Bienno Borgo degli Artisti and Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation. Since the past seven years, Carlo has been collaborating with social cooperatives in his home region in the Italian Alps to produce documentaries focusing on the assistance of persons with disabilities, and associations advocating the right to work for persons with fragilities.
Panagiotis Papafragkos (editing and creative direction) is a filmmaker and editor whose work inhabits the space between creative documentary and avant‑garde cinema. He studied documentary filmmaking in London and graduated with distinction from Brunel University in 2012, and has since worked across film, television, and contemporary art. He has edited and directed films that have screened and received awards at major festivals, including the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Doclisboa and DOC NYC, where First Milk (2024) continued its festival life with a North American premiere in 2025. His recent collaborations include feature and mid‑length documentaries such as Dear Future (dir. Christianna Cheiranagnostaki), The Heart of the Bull (dir. Eva Stefani), Enthymion (dir. Nikos Ziogas), Titi – In Cyclone’s Wake (dir. Natassa Blatsiou), and Elenit / Here Not Here (dir. Euripides Laskaridis & Eva Stefani). Panagiotis has collaborated with institutions including the Onassis Foundation, 2023 ELEVSIS – European Capital of Culture, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the BBC, and ERT. In 2021, he received a Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship from ARTWORKS, supporting the development of his practice. His current feature project K was presented at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival’s AGORA Docs in Progress in March 2026.