At first look, the biggest challenge in making the movie Himalaya appears to be its daunting logistics.

Director Eric Valli and his crew spent nine months in Nepal's remote and restricted Dolpo region, the highest altitude inhabited place on Earth. They endured the thin atmosphere of life at 6,000 metres, winter blizzards and -30C temperatures.

But the director had other dangers in mind when he set out to tell the story of his Dolpo friends and expose their way of life to the world in the film, which opens in Toronto theatres tomorrow.

"For me, the trickiest part, the thing that scared me the most was not so much the physical and the technical problems. It was, will I be able, even though they were my friends ... to bring them into this dream of mine?" the 48-year-old Frenchman was saying on the phone last week.

"It was not capturing images as I had done before as a documentary filmmaker or as a National Geographic photographer. It was making images. So this time I was going to disturb their life."

Himalaya, which was a best foreign-language film nominee at this year's Oscars, is the story of an intergenerational clash over the leadership of a tiny, ethnically Tibetan community of salt trading caravaneers. Key characters are based on and in one case, played by, Valli's closest friends in the place he's been visiting as a traveller, photographer, author and documentarian for the past 20 years. Thinlen Lhondup, a 60-year-old Dolpo chief, essentially plays himself. The film was cast almost entirely from the region with non-performers who had, with few exceptions, never even seen a movie let alone been in one.

The story was written in collaboration with Lhondup and with Valli's other Dolpo friend, lama Tenzing Norbou, who did not play his fictional counterpart because he was judged to be too old. What Valli discovered was that cinematic storytelling also has a parallel in Dolpo culture. When someone important dies, friends gather to write a namdar, a biography, to commemorate the life.

"I remember reading for the first time the script that we had developed together to my Dolpo friends and Norbou stood up and said, 'We just wrote the biography of our life, of our culture.' So for the first time, we were writing a namdar without a pen and a piece of paper. We were writing a namdar with a Panavision camera and with a crew of foreign people and things like that, but the process was exactly the same.

"Also, they were very proud that these yellowheads, as they call us, would come and spend so much time and energy and so on about their own culture. which they see disappearing, vanishing. Like Thinlen used to say, 'It's important we make this film before tradition melts like snow under the sun.'"

Among the 'yellowheads' was Vancouver-born photojournalist Debra Kellner, who went along on the shoot to author Himalaya, a coffee-table book about the making of the film. She and Valli have since married and had a baby daughter.

"It was the beginning of our love story and we knew if we survived that one, we would be able to survive any other one," Valli said.

He has also since fulfilled his promise to Lhondup that he would return the favour and introduce him to his country. After a few days in Paris, after Lhondup had experienced travel by train, car and boat, after he'd shown him the splendour of Notre Dame, Valli asked his old friend for his impressions.

"I said, 'Thinlen, how do you feel? What do you feel about the place?' And he said, 'How clever. How clever.'"


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