Technology and spiritual belief meet aboard a Nepalese cable car in the latest hypnotic observational documentary to come out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (Leviathan, Sweetgrass)

High on a ridge in the Nepalese foothills sits Manakamana, a Hindu temple once approachable only by steep mountain paths. Today the most arduous stage of the trek can be avoided via a ten-minute ride in a cable car suspended high above the bush-clad valleys. Directors Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s (literally) transporting film—shot inside a gondola that carries pilgrims and tourists to and from a mountaintop temple is radically simple in its conception. Each of its 11 shots lasts as long as a one-way ride, which corresponds to the duration of a roll of 16mm film. Working within a 5-by-5-foot glass and metal box, this endlessly suggestive film both describes and transcends the bounds of time and space making a kind of head movie that viewers are invited to complete as they watch. Within the inexorable repetition of the gondola’s journey we behold a cavalcade of rich and poor, young and old, the devout, the jocular, the touristic, the anxious, the elated – even a carload of goats!

Manakamana is thrillingly mysterious in its effects: a staged documentary, a beguiling cross between science fiction, ethnography and an airborne version of an Andy Warhol screen test. A festival hit that has swooped top prizes at Locarno Film Festival and has wooed both critics and all those who have had the pleasure to step aboard.

Ticket prices: Screenings before 16:00: £5.50 full / £4.00 concessions. Screenings after 16:00: £8.00 full / £6.50 concessions.

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