Nepal's Disaster Movie at the Box Office: The Curious Case of Shambhala

A film can win praise in Berlin and still lose money at home. That is the strange story of "Shambhala" — the most expensive movie Nepal has ever made, and, going by ticket sales, one of its biggest money losers too.

"Shambhala" is directed by Min Bahadur Bham, the filmmaker known for "Kalo Pothi." He also co-wrote the film with Abinash Bikram Shah. It was made by a large team of producers, including Debaki Rai and Bibhakar Sunder Shakya from Nepal, working with partners from France, Norway, and several other countries. This made "Shambhala" an international co-production, which is one reason its budget grew so large.

The story is set in Upper Dolpo, a remote Himalayan region where one woman can be married to more than one man, a tradition called polyandry. Thinley Lhamo plays Pema, a young woman married to three brothers. When her husband disappears on a trading trip, suspecting her of cheating on him, she sets out through the mountains to find him, with one of her other husbands, a monk played by Sonam Topden, by her side. The film runs 150 minutes and moves slowly, with long, quiet shots of snow-covered mountains.

The film reportedly cost around रू15 crore, or close to $1 million, to make. That is an enormous budget for Nepal, driven up by shooting for weeks in a remote, high-altitude region and finishing the sound and picture work abroad.
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When "Shambhala" opened in Nepali cinemas in September 2024, it did not earn that money back. Total collections at home came to only about रू2.1 to 2.5 crore, or around $160,000. In simple terms, for every rupee spent making the film, Nepali audiences paid back only about fourteen to seventeen paisa.

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At the same time, "Shambhala" did something no Nepali film had done before. It was chosen for the main competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it competed for the festival's top prize, the Golden Bear. It also played at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, in the festival's biggest showcase, the Piazza Grande. There, Thinley Lhamo won the Boccalino d'Oro award for best acting. Later, "Shambhala" became Nepal's official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.
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So was the film a success or a failure? Honestly, it was both — and that gap tells us something important about Nepali cinema today.

The slow, quiet style that impressed festival judges in Europe did not work as well for regular moviegoers in Nepal. Reviewing the film for the Kathmandu Post, journalist Anuj Arora praised its message about motherhood and family loyalty, but pointed out real problems too — continuity mistakes, questions the story never answers, and, in his view, too many long, still shots of mountains that slow the film down without adding much. He compared these lingering shots to song sequences in Bollywood movies, except that a song, at least, gives the audience something enjoyable to watch.

Other viewers were just as divided. Some called the film beautiful and deeply moving. Others, writing on film sites like Letterboxd, found it slow and repetitive despite its stunning visuals.

This split makes sense once you think about who was watching. Festival judges were looking for craft and a new, unfamiliar world shown with honesty. A regular audience buying a ticket on a Friday night in Kathmandu was often hoping for something livelier — a story that moves faster and pulls them in.

Even star power at the premiere could not change this. Bollywood figures Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Anurag Kashyap attended the opening show, which brought the film plenty of media attention. But that attention did not turn into ticket sales once the film settled into its regular run in theatres.

"Shambhala" is not the only Nepali film to struggle at home despite good reviews. According to veteran film distributor Prachandaman Shrestha, about seventy percent of Nepali films fail simply because the content is weak. But another fifteen to twenty percent are genuinely good films that still fail to earn money, because the timing, public mood, and circumstances around their release do not line up in their favour. Marketing is often an afterthought, added in after the production budget is already spent, and years of overhyped, disappointing releases have left many Nepali viewers cautious about Nepali films in general.
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Seen this way, "Shambhala" was fighting on two fronts at once. It had to win over an audience that already doubts Nepali cinema, and it had to do this as a slow, subtitled arthouse film with no songs and no comic relief, competing for screens against louder, more commercial movies.

None of this means "Shambhala" failed on its own terms. Arthouse films almost never make their money back at the local box office anywhere in the world. Their real audience is festivals, critics, and international viewers, not the local multiplex. By that measure, "Shambhala" achieved something rare — it placed a Nepali film in direct competition with the best of world cinema and won a Nepali actress an award on a European stage.

The harder question is what this means for the next filmmaker who wants to try something equally ambitious. A million-dollar budget is a huge risk in a market where even a hit film rarely earns more than a few crore rupees. If Nepal's most celebrated film in years could not earn back even a fifth of its cost at home, other producers may take the safer lesson from this — stick to familiar, commercial stories instead of bold ones.

That would be the real disaster: not the loss on one film's balance sheet, but the chilling effect on the kind of ambition that took "Shambhala" all the way to Berlin.

Nepali cinema clearly has the talent and the stories to compete on the world stage; "Shambhala" proved that. What it still lacks is the trust of its own audience, the marketing muscle, and cinema screens willing to give a slow film enough time to find its viewers. Until that changes, Nepal may keep making films the world wants to watch, while losing money on the ones closest to home.