The series Beyond the Spotlight from The Better India highlights the culture of regional, independent, and often underestimated artists who are transforming Indian cinema and art, focusing on one story, one village, and one language at a time.
For most of her working life, a midwife named Boa Dolma traversed the same arduous path daily—a narrow, slippery trail of dry mud, barely wide enough for one person, which took over an hour to descend into Kanhar, a village in Kinnaur that has since been abandoned due to landslides and dam construction. She went there because there was no other choice: no hospital, no road, no alternative; it was a requirement of the job itself.
Decades later, Boa Dolma's niece turned this walk and her entire life into India's first narrative film in the Kinnauri language. Niharikha Negi, the film's screenwriter and director, notes: 'It was like working—to make a film, you need the whole village, but we literally filmed the movie with the village.'
The story belonged to everyone before it belonged to her. Niharikha arrived in Kinnaur not as a filmmaker searching for a plot, but as a niece, a relative returning from Sungra in the Nehasar valley almost every year since 2022 to a place her own family considered home. During trips through the valley with the Asagri Jagash theatre group and the Starhopper studio, exploring a documentary theatre project on climate change and indigenous identity, the story of 'Tenfa' began to form—not as a script, but as a collection of conversations.
Niharikha describes her role as a 'facilitator of experience,' placing herself alongside her co-creators rather than above them. The story that emerged was Boa Dolma's story—a midwife revered throughout the region, whose life became the emotional core of the film. Her other aunt, Chachi, plays her on screen. In an unexpected turn, old footage of Chachi dancing as a young woman was found during the research and included in the final edit unchanged.
Before a single scene was shot, the script was returned to the community to which it belonged. It was shown to the Kinnauri Z-Tales cultural organization, managed by Pramiti and Mahesh Negi, as well as to Uncle Satish, who composed the film's original song to ensure everything 'sounded right.' Young actors read the script themselves, while the older generation listened to it personally, as stories were always passed down in Kinnaur. Niharikha believes this helped because the story did not feel foreign to anyone. According to her, Kinnaur is a 'culturally very rich region,' where 'singing, dancing, and aesthetic sense are woven into daily life,' and every woman in her family sings simply because that is what women in her family do.
The Grandmother Who Was Hardest to Convince
All the actors in 'Tenfa' are non-professionals, drawn entirely from the community. Niharikha calls this a deliberate choice based on her own experience of contemporary performance; she wanted to write 'a film that these people could make,' which was 'not far from their life experience.' Ironically, the most difficult person to cast was the grandmother—a role finally played by the village elder named Appi, after several unsuccessful attempts with other actors. Appi belongs to a generation that never learned to read; the only language she knew was conversational Kinnauri.
The team created a chain: Niharikha would explain Chachi's scene, and Chachi would translate it into Kinnauri for Appi. Appi's lines were taught through response, repeating them until they became familiar, and during filming, someone would crouch just off-camera, prompting her line by line. On paper, this sounds exhausting. However, on set, according to Niharikha, it was almost not a problem—Appi and the other actors mastered the strange new grammar of filmmaking, learning when to freeze and when not to look into the lens—'things that were not a problem at all.'
Behind all this was Chachi, performing quiet, unseen work that kept the shoot running—gathering goodwill in Sungra, persuading neighbors to help, managing local resources. The phrase 'de facto producer' does not quite describe her contribution.
Holding onto the Mountain, Literally
The terrain of Kinnaur shows no mercy to the film crew. Compared to softer valleys like Sangla, Niharikha describes it as 'quite hilly'—six days of shooting across sixteen locations required manually carrying equipment along trails inaccessible to vehicles, and then back up. One moment stands out more than others: a scene shot on the slope of Rarang, a scorched, slippery hill, where the entire crew had to slide down and cling to trees or rocks to maintain position during the take. The cinematographer nearly lost his balance completely; the crew held him while Niharikha held a tree with one hand and looked at the monitor with the other.
The sound engineer descended separately, hauling equipment until he found footing. In another spot, on a bridge near the dam construction site, barely large enough for one vehicle, the crew had 30 minutes—while their line producer stopped traffic on both sides—to capture the necessary shot. Ritik Negi, the Kinnauri assistant director who also managed the clapperboard, made it look effortless, descending what Niharikha calls 'suspicious trails in two seconds,' as if the mountain belonged to him—which in a way it did.
Despite all this, the production remained intentionally light. Line producer Mahesh Negi, who is also an environmental activist, insisted on 'green shooting'—using natural light wherever possible, one camera, three LED panels, and no waste that couldn't be recycled. The props used in the film were made by local artisans. The costumes were sewn by a village seamstress. Food came from local women who cooked for the actors and the crew.
Why a Simple Romance Wasn't Enough
In early drafts, Niharikha's 'Tenfa' started as a straightforward romance. It was during the editing phase that she felt something was missing. She noted that it could have been a story about anyone in any village in Himachal, but she lacked the specific weight of what Kinnaur itself was experiencing: a landscape that can change in months due to landslides, deforestation, and the slow erosion of memory.
So the film became something else—a hybrid of narrative and archive, combining personal footage Niharikha shot during each trip since 2022 with archival footage found from Doordarshan and independent documentaries on archive.org. She called the finished film a 'time capsule' of her family, her village, and Kinnaur at a moment that might never happen again.
This erosion is not abstract. Kinnaur is a constitutionally protected indigenous region, and its residents have the right to their land and forests; however, according to Niharikha, this land continues to be alienated under promises of local employment for dam construction, which rarely materializes. She says that 'it repeats a cycle of exploitation, returning nothing to the community from which it is taken.' She estimates that around 140 dams have been built, are under construction, or are planned along the Sutlej River, which flows through Kinnaur, a region also located in a seismically active zone.
Nevertheless, she tries not to oversimplify the argument. 'We weren't trying to say that development is bad,' she asserts. 'It's just when it is unsustainable and perhaps not scientific, and doesn't consider how the region can survive after all this development—that's what we might need to question.' This tension—between what Kinnaur gained and what it quietly lost—lies at the heart of the film's ending, which Niharikha deliberately left open. In Kinnauri narration, she explains, 'memory or knowledge is truly cosmic knowledge; it exists in the earth, nature, and air.' Folk songs, in her opinion, are a 'form of indigenous technology,' and 'Tenfa' ends not with an answer, but with the singing of people—a translation of an old song into different languages via mobile phone, without a literal explanation of the meaning.
Seeing Herself in Her Native Language for the First Time
If creating 'Tenfa' was collective, so was its first screening to an audience. Thirteen screenings over 10 days in Delhi, Chandigarh, Shimla, and Kinnaur gathered nearly a thousand viewers, roughly half of whom were schoolchildren. In Kinnaur, where there are no cinemas, the film traveled with a portable projector and speakers to schools and Gram Panchayats—equipment that, as Niharikha jokes, 'is almost better than some venues in Bombay.'
In one village, a screening was organized at the last minute during a religious festival, using a projector borrowed from a wedding equipment rental company. The entire village attended. In Sangla, the screening turned into a spontaneous two-hour concert where the film's composers performed folk songs, and invited residents sang everything they remembered. For Niharikha, watching entire families—grandmothers and grandchildren—sit together and then discuss what they saw, was a kind of homecoming. 'It restores faith in public screenings,' she says.
Children who appeared in the archival footage as toddlers came to the screening in Sungra as adults and watched the film twice—partially, as she suspects, just to see themselves. At a screening for 300 students at Eklavya School, a group of 12-year-old girls told her they liked horror films and wanted to become film directors. A group of 16-year-old boys asked sharp questions about the budget, editing, and who wrote the song. Niharikha notes: 'The emerging Alpha generation will be very interesting. They have such a wide range of tastes thanks to the internet,' and observes that they already understand the departments of film production as she only understood them in her early twenties.
What the Mountain Taught Her
Niharikha frankly admits that 'Tenfa' moved her away from her usual artistic instincts—her other works, she says, tend to be 'a bit daring' and not aimed at the widest audience. This film demanded something different: simplicity, patience, and a willingness to yield. She says, 'You have to let go of many notions about what a project should be or how you imagine it, and truly try to impose your intellectual vision onto something else.' Instead, she discovered she was working as a documentarian—responding to what her collaborators and circumstances gave her, rather than what she initially wrote in her head.
'Editing taught me to listen to the material and what it demands, instead of thinking about what it wasn't what you initially thought it would be,' she says. She believes that it was this surrender that allowed the film to turn out as it did: 'There is much truth in the film that truly resonates with people.' She describes the entire experience—from the script to the shoots and seeing herself on screen in the villages—as a journey. 'Climbing the mountain,' she calls it. 'A journey that changes you because of what you experience along the way.'
Her Advice If You Want to Start
Niharikha does not idealize the industry she works in. 'The industry you know as the industry has collapsed,' she states. 'It practically doesn't exist—there is no real business model that actually generates profit.' Her advice for beginners boils down to this: start with what you already have access to, wherever you are. Be clear about what you are doing.