Baato review – Nepal’s past and future collide in an immersive, fraught documentary

Nepal’s timeless past and slowly encroaching future collide in Lucas Millard and Kate Stryker’s documentary Baato (which translates to: The Path). Through two separate but intertwined stories Baato examines a country with some of the most remote communities in the world and its struggle to connect them. With one strand following a rural family making their annual 300 mile trek from their village in the mountains to a large city market to sell medicinal herbs and the other a group of government labourers building a new paved road in this region, we get an immersive and fraught insight into the region.

Though there are some fun moments of the road-builders’ camaraderie in the face of woeful work conditions (in one sequence, we return to their worksite to find their bulldozer has sunk into a river), it’s the long walk that provides Baato its heart. A family journey, with matriarch Mikma in the lead, it’s a head-spinning tour of Nepal’s vertiginous mountain paths that hums with tension, not least because the group has brought two young kids and two puppies along with them.

The close-quarters camerawork is genuinely dizzying whenever the group crosses one of the many miles-high bridges on the route, and the visual ambition extends elsewhere, too – a transition from autumn to winter is beautifully done. There is, frankly, not much real punch to either story, and the slow nature of Nepal’s bureaucracy (the workers grumble about how much quicker the Chinese would get the road built) means there isn’t exactly an ending, so it’s more interesting than affecting.

As an exploration of an often unseen (though still globalised, as evidenced by the Angry Birds T-shirts you can spy around the place) world, though, Baato is worth catching on a big screen if you can, fascinated by this ancient, natural place without romanticising it. It’s in avoiding this orientalist pitfall that Baato’s execution matches its themes, keeping a keen eye on both the past and the future.

Baato is released in a UK cinemas on 28 July.