Acccording to Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily:
The second feature from writer-director Min Bahadur Bham, following 2015’s The Black Hen – Nepal’s official Oscars entry and a Venice Critics Week winner – Shambhala’s visual sweep and emotional accessibility deserve to bring it attention.
It’s a visually stunning slow-burner, filmed high in the Himalayas, with a quietly magnetic central performance from Thinley Lhamo as the beleaguered heroine, amid a largely non-professional local cast.
Shambhala is to all intents and purposes an insider portrait of traditional life in the Himalayas. Glimpses of digital watches and modern rainwear betray the fact that we are in the present day, although the way of life in the countryside is clearly centuries old. The heroine is Pema (Thinley Lhamo), a young woman who is about to marry multiple husbands, according to her karma and the local tradition of polyandry.
As the seemingly placid but indomitably tough, determined Pema pursues her mission, stones carved by her errant husband – tributes to family members, as well as testaments to his feelings – come to punctuate her journey, as do occasional unobtrusive but eloquent dream sequences in sepia. Shambhala – the name refers to a spiritual kingdom in Tibetan Buddhism – is a visually magnificent piece. DoP Aziz Jan Baki shoots in widescreen, predominantly in long takes with slow pans that open up the vast rocky valleys and the more intimate, often intricately composed, domestic spaces, lit by the warm glow of oil lights.
The film doesn’t need to explain too much about the nature of the society it depicts: everything becomes amply clear thanks to a crisply delineated narrative and the cast’s ability to tenderly sketch the vibrations between the characters. Even so, Shambhala nicely handles the ambivalence of Pema’s situation, and of people’s changing moods, not least Karma’s fluctuations between tetchy reserve and candid devotion to his sister-in-law, and Dawa’s very engaging shifts between fond childish candour and outright brattiness. A huge, very watchable supporting cast of goats, sheep, horses and shaggy, ambling yaks forms an ever-active background chorus for this quietly involving odyssey.
