The Himalaya Film Festival 2008 will be held for the 6th time in De Griffioen, the cultural centre of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Netherlands on 9 and 10 February.

For two days, approximately 45 films and documentaries would be screened among which 19 are from the Himalayan nation of Nepal.

“The programme offers a great diversity of footage, visitors will be treated to kaleidoscopic perceptions”, organizer Mr Glenn Mitrasing said. “The theme of the festival is ‘compassion’ which is what inspires both participants and organization. It returns throughout the programme.”

A striking example is the film A Climb for Peace featuring an Israeli and a Palestine climbing Mount Everest together. The Kashmir issue comes up in the film How We Celebrate Freedom and Tibet’s situation is referred to in 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama.

The lecture about the impact of climate change on the yak herds high in the Himalaya by the American Professor Barbara Brower is another highlight. Once she went there to teach the herds about the management and protection of high waste lands, but soon she turned out to be the one learning from the yak herds with their generations of knowledge of and experience with the most difficult rangelands on earth. However, despite their wealth of knowledge the yak herds seem to have no answer to the threats of climate change. nepalnews.com ag Feb 01 08