Within the first few minutes of Nihaarika Negi’s Tenfa, the loneliness of its primary character is apparent. Dolma (Leela Negi), the region’s sole midwife, must traverse ruthlessly industrialised lands to deliver the first baby born in ten years in a remote, rugged tribal region of Kinnaur. At this moment, Anshul Uniyal’s camera is placed almost eerily, as if the audience has already been trapped in the film’s world, where ecology and human populations are dying while a hollow facade of industrial progress quietly termites the region left behind.
Set against the Himalayas, Tenfa (Kinnauri for “a gift from the elders”) is a poignant exploration of migration, memory, and ecological collapse. The short film follows Dolma, the region’s sole midwife, who, when an unprecedented tragedy strikes, leads an intergenerational group of women up the treacherous mountain range. Guided only by the verses of an ancient folk song, the three of them embark on a desperate search for a rare indigenous herb to save a young mother’s life.
The film explores how ecological collapse drives mass migration, leaving three stranded women behind to protect their homeland after the promises of urban development fail them. As the sole guardians of a dying culture, their struggle highlights the tragedy of cultural loss while simultaneously emphasising the power of their quiet resistance. Thus, as the film progresses, the ecological deterioration and the outmigration it engenders finds its expression as the audience is introduced to the almost ghostly town of Kandar, or even in the recurring difficult terrain the intergenerational trio of women must cross to breathe life into a dying body.
Nihaarika Negi wrote, directed, and produced the film, which first premiered at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) in April 2026. Since then, it has travelled through community spaces, independent film festivals, and venues across India, earning critical acclaim.
The film is running in community and independent screenings. It was also recently screened at ML Bhartia Auditorium, organised by Fillum, an independent film screening platform.
A part-Indigenous, award-winning interdisciplinary artist and Berlinale Talent, Negi draws on folklore, magical realism, and the lived realities of Kinnauris in Tenfa. Her work has previously been supported by Sundance+WIF, Film Independent, and UK ACE. She has worked on A City of Foxes, The Threshold, and Hunger, and her practice spans film, theatre, and XR, bringing together contemporary performance, folktale, and magical realism.
In this interview with The Migration Story, Negi reflects on the film’s roots in her family history, the role of language and outmigration, and the narrative devices she employs to tell the story.
How much does the film draw on your experiences as someone who has a close association with the region of Kinnaur?
It draws little from my actual experiences. I did not grow up in Kinnaur; however, my father was from Kinnaur. He also never grew up in the valley; he was sent outside for his education, to Shimla, when he was very young. Educational migration has been a constant in the valley. So, I did not have too much connection with Kinnaur growing up. I just had family members there. It was only quite recently, since 2022, that I started to go back to Kinnaur every year. I rediscovered for myself what that part of my heritage is about. I think the film has emerged from a series of conversations I have been having with my family members, like my bua (paternal aunt), whose life this film is based on, who was a midwife in Kinnaur, and my chachi (aunt), who plays Dolma in this film.
So, it is based on conversations with these people. My producing partner, Star Hopper Studio, was quite instrumental in the initial research we were doing in Kinnaur. We went up to research for a documentary cum theatre project around climate change and indigenous identity, and during that time, I also led some theatre workshops with the people in Kinnaur, exploring how their memories of the valley are changing from the time they were young to how things are now. Also, with our community partners, ZedTells and Mahesh Negi, who is an activist and educator in the region, we went across all of the impact areas across the valley, which have been affected because of either dam construction, deforestation for electrical lines, and other kinds of things. It was really this amalgamation of these things, where I was understanding and witnessing the shift across the length of the valley in a broader sense. But also, hearing what the personal challenges were that people were facing daily as a result of it and how much of Kinnauri history, culture and heritage, because it is an oral language, has been undocumented. Even the memory of what was being lost was being lost, because there were no markers to preserve what had been theirs before in a way that the modern world can understand.
The film really came from this desire of trying to create an archive or a time capsule of the community and its memories, and to try to weave that in through a narrative that, in a way, is a narrative of the character who separated from their culture and is compelled to return to and realise what that means. For me, in that sense, it is my journey, but it is also a film very much about the community and has been made with their concerns in mind.
Language also finds a very interesting space within the film. As a result of an eroding population, language seems to disappear, too. The older generation represented by Iti’s grandmother cannot convey her message, while Iti, as a displaced generation, has not inherited it. Here, migration then becomes the primary driver of cultural loss. Can you please talk about this?
The observation came from a lot of research that we were doing in Kinnaur. When we went up to research for this documentary, we documented many folk songs with members of my family and Satish Negi, who composed the original folk song for the film and sang it. I think, in the process of just doing that and asking Kinnauris to translate the song we documented because we wanted to subtitle it, we came up against this really interesting thing: the younger generation, who would’ve studied the written word as opposed to the older ones who just have the oral language, did not know some of the words that were being sung in the song, and the older people who were singing the song also didn’t know what the words meant. I thought it wasn’t something that you can imagine because it is so specific to this process of translation and remembering and how knowledge is passed down across generations, but also how it is forgotten. That’s what I thought was really interesting but also devastating at the same time because there were entire histories of indigenous knowledge was really in the minds of the elders, and most of the elders were disappearing, and knowledge was disappearing with them.
I thought that the device of a folk song that people can’t remember the words to, that maybe contains something essential to the preservation of life, could be an interesting narrative device to speak about the intergenerational loss, but also how language shapes our mindsets, the way we think and operate. I feel that quite personally because I don’t speak Kinnauri. My mindset is very much shaped by English and Hindi, and in a way they are both dominant languages. English, obviously, is a colonising language, but Hindi is also a dominant language that does overpower indigenous and regional languages, and brings with it its own mindsets. Those mindsets are starkly different from the mindsets of the Kinnauri language. This was also a way to look at how different generations were experiencing the world because it was being shaped by the way that they saw it through words. For Iti’s generation, they have been educated in English and Hindi and have had more formal education. Having said this, they are incredibly more proficient at looking at technology and modernity not necessarily as evil but really as a tool that they can use for their own advantage. A lot of the young people in Kinnaur are their own ethnographers; they are documenting their own cultures, and they have YouTube and Instagram channels. When I was initially researching, I found a lot about Kinnaur through these channels, and it was quite an incredible thing to see. I really felt that it was the younger generation who was reframing what it means to preserve indigenous identity inside of the world that they have been born into. I just felt that maybe these things could be in a conversation with each other through this device of a song that they need to translate.
The grandmother’s fading memory mirrors the emptying valley. What does her character stand for regarding the connection between memory and displacement?
The character was written for Aapi, the grandmother who plays the role. My grandmother and she were best friends for around 40 years. My grandmother passed away last year at the age of 106. We met them both together, and just meeting them was an event itself. They were such incredibly interesting and vibrant characters, and when they spoke, they had memories and histories from a time that even my father’s generation didn’t remember. I entered this space, almost like an outsider; I asked a lot of questions that people were willing to answer, but a lot of times, the responses I would get were like, “We don’t remember”. Aapi would tell me stories of what I used to ask about, and then I also tried to ask my cousins to translate so that I could understand what was being narrated. She would speak half Kinnauri and half Hindi. Even my cousin couldn’t translate sometimes what Aapi was saying, because she also didn’t know what she was saying. I felt that was already a perfect capsule of the loss across generations and how much was being lost not only in translation, but also in remembering.
What does it mean to remember not only in oral culture, but at a time when we are so inundated with information because of technology and the internet? In India, all of us are a generation online, and our memories are quite terrible. Now, we can Google everything. So, what does it mean to remember across generations and how to understand information and knowledge in very different ways? I was interested in exploring that, but I was also enamoured by all of the women in my family, the elder women specifically, who, in many ways, I thought were much more modern and forward-thinking than some of the people of our generation. I also experienced that a lot of women in my village I was meeting were really independent, and they lived full lives. Their work on the land, with the animals, the food they made and cooked, all of the festivities and culture in Kinnaur, was incredibly dynamic and fulfilling. These women would be having dinner, and then they would suddenly feel like dancing; they would gather around in a circle and then start singing and dancing. I just thought that this was quite incredible and liberating. There was so much agency, at least in the way I experienced it, in how these women used their time, joy and labour. I really wanted to make a film that was also celebrating these generations of women, and it started with the elders and what they represented. Because I was coming from outside of the region, I realised how different it was from the rest of India and the kind of freedom that women seem to have at a fundamental level in Kinnaur.
Do you think that the film serves as a statement for counter-migration and preservation of indigenous knowledge systems?
I really hope so. I believe that it is really about questioning the idea that we have been taught to believe is progress and how we have always been taught that to progress is to move away from your own culture and identity, to a different one that is more acceptable. In many ways, this film is personal because I was battling with this same idea, between trying to move forward and assimilate into the English-speaking culture and finding it the only way to be really successful. In the process of doing that for myself, I realised that if you don’t have a connection to your own heritage, and if you don’t have an understanding of who you are and where you come from, then there isn’t a lot that you can offer to the world as an artist or a storyteller, specifically. I think the film was really speaking to this idea of not looking at returning as the opposite of progress, and cherishing the fact that having a connection with your community is really a thing you need to find a new measure of success. It is also speaking to what I witnessed and experienced in my interactions with the young people I met in Kinnaur, where they were all returning and not thinking about moving abroad or living somewhere else. They were studying outside and coming back to see how they could serve the people in their village and their culture. I found that to be incredibly inspiring. The film speaks to that, but also speaks to the argument about the importance of learning the language because that is really disappearing. A lot of the young people we met during the screening tour of Tenfa across Kinnaur did mention to us that they speak little Kinnauri, and there has always been a gap because they couldn’t understand their grandmothers, and that was really a more tangible sort of thing that the film was speaking to and how we can learn and preserve the language of the region.
Zainab is an independent writer and researcher based in New Delhi.
