SANSARI. THE GODDESS AND THE CORONA IN HIMALAYA
End of March 2020. In a village in Nepal, affected like the rest of the country - and the world - by containment, news of the virus spreads. Some villagers decide to advance the rite to Sansari, goddess of epidemics, adapting it to the circumstances of the moment. Relationship with politics, relationship with nature, the place of the stranger, respect for tradition and adaptation to change, human and divine responsibility, rumour and learned discourse... As elsewhere, they look for what to think and what to do, and cobble together uncertain answers. This is an opportunity to discover other reflections on the current crisis linked to the virus, a shifted viewpoint, which nevertheless strangely echoes what is said and done in other parts of the world that the current epidemic has helped to make ever more global.
Documentary film by Grégoire Schlemmer, ethnologist, research fellow at the IRD, member of the Urmis.