OUR CATALOG
Drawing the Tiger
A film by Amy Benson, Scott Squire, Ramyata Limbu
US/Nepal | 2015 | 96 minutes | Color | DVD | Subtitled | Order No. 161195
SYNOPSIS
PRESS
"A quietly powerful film that will stick with viewers long after it ends."
"The filmmakers’ unwavering commitment to truthful storytelling achieves a rare, nonjudgmental respect for the lives of the people they observe."
SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS
- Film South Asia UNICEF Award
- CAAM Fest Documentary Award
- Sebastopol Special Jury Mention
- Northwest Film Forum Best Feature Award
- Margaret Mead Film Festival
- Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival
- Woodstock Film Festival
- Camden Intl Film Festival
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Amy Benson left her career as a middle school girls teacher to become a documentary filmmaker. Since switching fields, Benson has shot and edited over 30 short films telling the stories of nonprofits in North America, Africa and Asia. Her first independent documentary short, CALLED TO SHINE, about Clarksdale, Mississippi’s only female preacher premiered at the Langston Hughes film festival. Another short, THREE: IMPRESSIONS FROM THE STRUGGLE FOR GIRLS’ EDUCATION, was the centerpiece of the UNIFEM Singapore film festival. With her husband, Scott Squire, Amy co-owns Nonfiction Media, a production company based in Seattle. Amy is also a founding member of the Seattle Documentary Association - a community for Seattle filmmakers to thrive. Her first feature documentary, DRAWING THE TIGER, is a granted project of both the Sundance Institute and Fork Films. It premiered at Hot Docs in April 2015 and has since been in over 30 film festivals worldwide. It has been awarded the Best Feature Jury prize by the Northwest Film Forum, the Documentary Feature Award from CAAM Fest (Center for Asian American Media) and the UNICEF award at Film South Asia in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Amy has a Tedx talk about her experience making DRAWING THE TIGER. (01/20)
Scott is a lifelong photographer with a masters in journalism (Berkeley). His work on a homeless children living in Bucharest earned him the Dorothea Lange Fellowship and the Susan Meiselas Fellowship from UC Berkeley. Scott’s photo essay on post-9/11 Cairo street café culture was featured on PBS’s Frontline World website. His first book, Edges of Bounty (2009, Heyday Press), is a fine art documentary photo essay on small scale, independent food production in the Central Valley of California. His latest book of photography, See Them Run: Great Plains Coyote Coursing (University Press of Mississippi) was released in November 2015. Drawing the Tiger is his first feature. (6/18)
Ramyata co-produced and shot the documentary Dreams of Chomolungma for PBS’s Frontline World, and co-produced and shot the award winning feature documentary, Daughters Of Everest. For six years she was a producer for Young Asia Television, producing programs focusing on social issues in Nepal. Ramyata is the also the director of the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival (KIMFF). Her most recent documentary work is co-producing Sari Soldiers, another Sundance Institute grantee— a film about female soldiers on both sides of the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. She is currently working as a correspondent for Al Jazeera. She has been busy covering the stories of people and places hardest hit by the 2015 Nepal earthquake.
Subject Areas
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The Sari Soldiers
When Devi, mother of a 15-year-old girl, witnesses her niece being tortured and murdered by the Royal Nepal Army, she speaks publicly about the atrocity. The army abducts her daughter in retaliation, and Devi embarks on a three-year struggle to uncover her daughter’s fate and see justice done. The Sari Soldiers follows her and five other brave women: Maoist Commander Kranti; Royal Nepal Army Officer Rajani; Krishna, a monarchist from a rural community who leads a rebellion against the Maoists; Mandira, a human rights lawyer; and Ram Kumari, a young student activist shaping the protests to reclaim democracy. The Sari Soldiers delves into the extraordinary journey of these women on opposing sides of the conflict and the democratic revolution reshaping their country’s future.