30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

Sking is one of the most isolated villages in the Himalayan region of Zanskar at an altitude of almost 4000 meters in the north of India. The people who live here have only three months, from August to October, to reap the harvest and store it on the roofs of the little brick houses. Summer is very brief, but winter seems to drag on forever. It is the women, be they young or old, who are responsible for the harvest, which goes on from dawn until dusk without a break. They know that winter will arrive, early and implacable. Marianne Chaud lived for one summer with these women and she tells us their story. By living with them, helping with their work, speaking their language, and listening to their worries, hopes and dreams, she gives us an intimate portrait in which the movie cameras seem to disappear. The director enters into the lives of the women of Sking as though she is one of them. In the foreground are the faces and expressions of four generations of women; in the background, the magnificent, tremendous mountains of Zanskar. 

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  Marianne Chaud

  Born in 1976 in Briançon in the Hautes-Alpes, Marianne Chaud is an ethnologist who graduated from the EHESS and dedicated her doctoral thesis to the Ladakh region of the Himalayas. For twelve years she lived between France and the remote Himalayan valleys of northern India. Her work as a filmmaker began in these very valleys in 2009, with a technique reduced to the essentials: a camera, a microphone, no crew. She returned to her place of origin, in the Briançon area, precisely during the first arrivals of migrants on foot through the snowy passes between France and Italy. L'aventure tells of her encounter with some of their stories.