Odd News

Nepal's documentary director tells stories of small people

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-12-18 18:47

KATHMANDU: A 30-year-old Nepali director is on a cultural campaign to tell the story of Khagendra Thapa Magar, a 17-year-old boy who is readying to claim the title of the world' s shortest person next year, and of dozens of other vertically challenged men and women who have to struggle to have a normal life.

Shekhar Khanal, who runs a cultural organization in the capital called Shikhar Nepal, is shooting a documentary film on the life of Khagendra, who weighed only 600 grams when he was born and stopped growing from the age of 11.

The biographical film starts from Dhullubaskot village in Nepal 's Baglung district, a remote underdeveloped area that can be reached only after walking for eight hours from the closest town.

Khanal says the documentary will be completed next year after Khagendra turns 18 years old on October 14 and can officially apply to the Guinness Book of World Records to lay claim to the shortest man in the world.

"I have been researching Khagendra and shooting for three years, " Khanal told Xinhua. "The documentary, that is also his first official electronic biography, will also focus on his family, his village, his school friends and everyone else he has been in contact with during his campaign to win the Guinness title."

The other celebrities associated with Khagendra in the documentary are Nepal's leading political figures like Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sujata Koirala, and former prime minister and leader of the opposition Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda.

During the last fortnight, Khagendra, his father Rup Bhadur Thapa Magar, and Min Bahadur Rana Magar, president of the organization that is helping Khagendra's campaign, came to Kathmandu from Pokhara town to meet the political leaders, all of whom have assured they would help with the campaign.

Prior to making the documentary on Khagendra, Khanal directed a feature film, called "Sarathi" (Chariot Driver), the only film in Nepal to have a small person as the hero and with the cast dominated by small people.

Khanal says his attention was drawn to small people after he saw one of them, Loknath Dhakal, a man under four feet, on television.

"I met Dhakal one day by chance and we became good friends," he says. "He introduced me to other small people like him living in and outside Kathmandu."

Khanal saw how society treated them as objects of ridicule and the ordeal they faced while doing little things like opening a door, getting water from a tap or even climbing stairs. ?

Sarathi, made in 2003, shows how small people come together to stop a bullying gang from attacking them and how the hero, played by Dhakal, is married to a woman who is of normal height.