The Film Project

THE FILM PROJECT

A research expedition from Göttingen/Germany traveled to the wildest and most aboriginal parts of the Nepalese Himalayas in 2009 and produced a documentary in HD.

SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND

Highmountain geomorphologist Hannes Künkel (Dipl. Geogr.) was the leader of this undertaking. Its main aim was to analyse ancient trade routes and mountain trails in the Himalayas in an environmental context. All this is part of his PhD-thesis at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen/Germany. He wanted to find out how the local climate and relief conditions affect the construction methods of traditional ways and whether the general climate change leads to an increasing potential for natural hazards.

Regarding growing tourism and the migration of mountain people into cities as well as the suppression of the traditional trade possibilities of Tibetan nomads through the Chinese, Hannes Künkel and his team tried to find old trading routes and develop a typology which combines the physical determinanting factors.

CONTENT AND STORY

Only accompanied by a small group of local porters and the camera man, Nils Peuse, Hannes Künkel and his team traveled around an extremely remote and partially unknown area, just as classic explorers such as Herbert Tichy & Shipton-Tilman once did. The 75-day-long expedition crossed three very remote passes of 5000+ metres a.s.l and had to sustain temperatures as low as -18°C.

In the times of heaps of large-scale projects, himalways.de documented impressive ice giants, arid landscapes and tibetan settlements by using minimal financial resources and little technical effort. Due to that, personal initiative, spirit of adventure and exploration were all the more important to make people understand the extreme need for basic research in this unreal part of our earth.