AFTER THE SNOWMELT
MQ Hof 8
MQ Arena 21
Free Entry
TWN, JPN | 2024 | D: Lo Yi-Shan | 110 min | OV with English subtitles
Austria Premiere
Shooting concept & camera: Lo Yi-Shan
2nd camera: Wei-Long TSAI
Sound: Yannick Dauby
Editing: Lin Jessica Wan-Yu
Producers: Lo Yi-Shan, Yung Shuang Chen, Cho Tze-Lan, Asako Fujioka, Angel Wen Chen
Distribution: Square Eyes
Two close friends in their early 20s go missing on a hike to Mount Everest in Nepal in 2017. They were found 47 days later in a cave far from Sagarmatha National Park, where they had sought shelter due to a snowstorm. One of them miraculously survived. The young filmmaker and best friend of the two, Lo Yi-Shan, sets out in search of traces of this friendship in order to come to terms with their loss. Video footage of hiking tours, carefree conversations and meetings before the tragedy are interspersed with images that cannot be localised or placed in time. Lo Yi-Shan comments on this footage by reflecting on several levels of memory and loss. Her surviving friend does not want to comment on what happened. He almost exuberantly declares that he wants to put the experiences behind him. So the director sets off for Nepal to retrace her friends' journey in the wilderness.
"We were looking for unbridled nature, freedom and adventure, which made us forget the boundaries of the fenced gardens of civilisation. Will only the stones under my feet remain?" (Lo Yi-Shan)
Lo Yi-Shan is an independent Taiwanese filmmaker and author. Since her teenage years, she has been fascinated by the intertwined relationships between people and nature in the mountains. Communicating the complexity of wilderness has motivated her to make films. AFTER THE SNOWMELT (2024) is her first documentary film.