LA ROUTE
HIMALAYAN ROAD: A NEW FRONTIER
Marianne Chaud / France / 2025 / 85 min / Colour
European premiere
Zanskar is a region in the Kargil district of Ladakh, nestled between the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges. At an average altitude of 4,000 meters, its people have long survived by raising livestock and farming the land. It is one of the most inaccessible places on Earth, but that is about to change. A new road is being built to link Zanskar with the outside world. Many locals have sold parts of their land and livestock, trading their lives as herders for that of laborers. Every day they make their way to the road construction site, sometimes on foot, sometimes packed into trucks, to break rocks and level the path with gravel and sand. Filmmaker Marianne Chaud focuses her gaze particularly on the women, who work tirelessly yet continue to smile, and on the children, blissfully unaware of the historic transformation about to reshape their homeland. Because while the road will certainly ease travel for local residents, it will also open the region to outsiders. And so, the question lingers: what will happen to the harmonious balance that the people of Zanskar have preserved for generations?
Marianne Chaud
A French ethnologist and documentary filmmaker born in 1976, her anthropological research focuses primarily on the Ladakh-Zanskar region of the Himalayas. She specialized at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She directed Himalaya, la terre des femmes (2007) and Himalaya, le chemin du ciel (2008), both Lessinia d’Argento winners and awardees at the Trento Film Festival and the Festival Internazionale del Cinema di Montagnain Autrans. La Nuit nomade (2012) also earned recognition at the Film Festival della Lessinia.
