Picture yourself eating dāl bhāt in a Nepali restaurant in Amsterdam. The sun plays lightly along the cobblestones, the tourists go about their strange European lives, fiddling with cameras, furtively glancing at the racks of lewd postcards and daydreaming in the fog of legal dope. The walls are peppered with sun-worn Everest panoramas and the ubiquitous Kutumba plays softly. The rice is hot but minimal, the dāl buttery, the achar spicy enough. Europe, yet not “Europe”. Bhaskar Dhungana’s directorial debut Suntali is this sort of experience – unique and vivid, and somehow wedged into the strange territory between being a Nepali film and being a Nepali idea of a Nepali film.

The film owes more than just the name to Amelie, (not a far cry from “Suntali” eh?) and has the same flirt and frolic set in some mystical old world of cobblestones and narrow streets. The soundtrack is whimsically, and almost incongruously, European – fuelled by violins as plucky as a baby goat.  The cinematography is beautifully shot, at such high-definition that a paragraph of this review could be dedicated solely to the skill (and occasional gaffes) of the makeup artists. The sound is fantastic. The storyline, while occasionally jumpy, is grabbing and compelling and resolved, and is driven by a strong, empowered female character – this fact alone makes the film worth seeing.

Bandipur itself can be seen as a character, simultaneously playing the role of the classic and aesthetically perfect Nepali gāu and the place in Nepal that looks the most like Florence.  We see the town across the seasons – both in the bright fall, and the rain-soaked summer (occasionally even in the same scene). Suntali’s Bandipur is a fantasyland, a model of Nepal’s pastoral life as imagined by Kathmandu. It’s no surprise that the villain is from India.

The keen viewer will appreciate how the film tips its hat to a range of literary and cultural references, from Macbeth to Rajesh Hamal. Most will smirk at the litany of visual penis jokes.  The script is ambitious – one of the main characters has no spoken lines whatsoever – and the actors’ great energy is highlighted by Dhungana’s affinity for holding the massively high resolution camera dangerously close to their faces.

And that’s the interesting thing about Suntali – how the film seems to understand itself through echolocation. The mixing of eras and influences, images and artistic devices creates a certain between-world. I believe that Dhungana meant to make Suntali a film about fantasy and whimsy. But the world he creates actually a very deft depiction of where Nepal is placed at this very moment in time, and in the world – Nepal, and yet not “Nepal”.