Deepak Rauniyar grew up in southern Nepal watching a cinema that did not contain him. He’s Madhesi, part of the darker-skinned community that makes up roughly a third of the country’s population, and on the Bollywood-inflected Nepali screen, people like him existed only as the joke, the heavy-accented buffoon, the role a light-skinned actor would play in blackface. As a boy he watched his father beaten and didn’t understand why. Decades later, after a career in journalism and two acclaimed features, he made Pooja, Sir, which premiered in the Orizzonti competition at Venice and went on to Busan, to put that missing world on screen with the complexity it was always denied.
The Journalist Who Had No Other Way In
Rauniyar’s path to the camera was a workaround. There was no film school he could afford and no set that would take a Madhesi outsider from beyond Kathmandu as an assistant, so he became a journalist, reviewing films and interviewing the very directors who’d otherwise never have let him near a production, until those relationships became his way in. He quit to assist on a feature in 2004. By 2012 his debut, Highway, became the first Nepali film to screen at a major international festival, premiering at the Berlinale and playing Locarno. His second feature, White Sun, competed at Venice in 2016, drew raves, and became Nepal’s submission for the Academy Awards. Pooja, Sir is his third, and the one he made himself wait three features to attempt, because he needed the craft and the distance to handle everything he’d lived. He’s blunt about why it had to be him: if he didn’t make this film, he says, no one else was going to.
A Procedural as a Trojan Horse
Pooja, Sir is set in a Nepal-India border town during the real 2015 Madhesi protests, when the community took to the streets for civil rights and the country was effectively blockaded for months. Into that powder keg the film drops a genre engine: two boys are kidnapped, and Detective Inspector Pooja Thapa, the country’s first female detective, is sent from Kathmandu to crack the case in forty-eight hours. Rauniyar chose the procedural deliberately, because it lets a popcorn-genre audience be walked into a reality they’d otherwise avoid.
Our job is to make people think and talk about it.
That’s his entire theory of the artist’s role, and the procedural is how he smuggles the thinking past the defenses. Pooja is light-skinned, an outsider in this town, and the investigation forces her to see the institutionalized racism the Madhesi live under. She’s played by Asha Magrati, Rauniyar’s wife and co-writer, who built the script with him and David Barker over eight years. The character grew directly out of their own cross-community marriage, Magrati from a light-skinned background, Rauniyar from a dark-skinned one, and Pooja’s father is drawn from Magrati’s own father, whom they lost during the film’s long development.
What He Took From Stray Dog
The structural model is Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 noir Stray Dog, which Rauniyar names as his first inspiration for the film.
Kurosawa’s film follows a rookie Tokyo detective whose pistol is stolen on a sweltering bus; his hunt for it pulls him through the squalor of postwar Japan until he discovers the thief is a war veteran much like himself, and the investigation curdles into an examination of his own dark side. That mirroring is the engine Rauniyar borrows. The point of his procedural isn’t to catch a villain; it’s to dissolve the line between the one who investigates and the world being investigated, so that the search for a perpetrator turns back on the searcher.
Here’s the stance the film earns. Its real subject isn’t the crime, it’s the apparatus that decides whose suffering even counts as one. Pooja is the law, an enforcer of the state, in the precise moment when the law is what the Madhesi are dying to resist. By placing his protagonist on that fault line, Rauniyar turns the procedural into a trap: the more honestly Pooja investigates the kidnapping, the more the state’s everyday violence swims into focus as the larger crime. It’s the move Bong Joon-ho made in Memories of Murder, where the failures of the investigators indict a whole political moment, and the one Anubhav Sinha made in Article 15, where an outsider officer’s case becomes an X-ray of caste.
Who is the real criminal here?
That’s the question he wants the audience holding as they leave, and it’s why he refuses the American thriller habit of an obviously crazy villain. Far more terrifying, he argues, is the ordinary person driven to the terrible thing, because that implicates the system that drove them, and you.
Authenticity Built From the Ground Up
The “culturally authentic” half of the episode’s title is not a slogan for Rauniyar; it’s a production method. Pooja is also queer, a detail seeded from a real police officer the couple interviewed during years of research, the kind of person who in that world is never openly out. Her foil is Mamata, a dark-skinned local Madhesi policewoman played by Nikita Chandak, and the film’s spine is the wary partnership these two women forge across the exact fault line the protests are about, setting aside the discrimination between them and the everyday misogyny of their own force long enough to do the job. The Nepali star Dayahang Rai, who anchored both of Rauniyar’s earlier features, plays their captain. The townspeople became the film. More than eight hundred extras turned up; the local police department supported a shoot that recreated the very protests that had made their lives miserable, and Rauniyar arrived braced for anger only to find residents handing his crew water bottles at dawn, glad someone was telling their story. Shot in the monsoon, with the constant terror that one day of rain and hundreds of extras could blow the budget, the production somehow wrapped three days early, and the film premiered on the 29th of August, the anniversary of its own shoot and Rauniyar’s birthday.
The Long Road and the Family You Build
None of it was easy. Pooja, Sir took eight years and a roughly million-dollar budget across a Nepal-USA-Norway co-production, half private money and half public funds, and the production nearly died more than once. COVID scattered the investors; then Magrati was diagnosed with cancer in 2022, and they relocated to New York for treatment as grants in France, Italy, and Singapore fell away. They took a year off, finished the treatment, and somehow found the road back, calling in friends until the money and the crew rematerialized. Rauniyar credits the international ecosystem that sustained him, the TIFF Filmmaker Lab and Berlinale Talents, mentors like Danis Tanović, whose No Man’s Land he’d watched on a pirated DVD and which shaped his earlier White Sun, and the European co-production model, where a producer in Norway or France isn’t chasing return on investment so much as a cultural statement, and brings a built-in distributor and audience with them. For a filmmaker who couldn’t afford film school and broke into the industry by interviewing its gatekeepers as a journalist, that web of collaborators is the whole point. His parting advice to his younger self is of a piece with it: stay open, stay unsure, keep someone close enough to question you. The films get made, and the missing world gets seen, precisely because no one builds them alone.
