The short video Bhakunde Bhoot, directed by Jeevan Sunuwar, has won the top award in the short video challenge organised by Kathmandu Metropolitan City under the Kathmandu Film Festival. The award was announced in Kathmandu, with the winning entry selected from a field of 35 submissions. Built around traditional beliefs and mysteries, the video claimed the highest honour in a competition that asked creators to respond to the theme 'My Culture, My Heritage', giving Sunuwar's work the distinction of being judged the strongest of them all.
Bhakunde Bhoot runs for 4 minutes 55 seconds, a compact runtime within which the film engages with age-old beliefs and the sense of mystery that surrounds them. The title itself evokes the world of spirits and folk tales, a storytelling space in which generations of communities have explained the unexplained and passed down warnings, wonders and customs. By taking the top award, the video has been recognised as the entry that best translated those traditional beliefs into a short, watchable screen story under the heritage-focused brief.
At a glance, the key facts of the competition and the winning entry are:
- Winning entry: Bhakunde Bhoot
- Director: Jeevan Sunuwar
- Runtime: 4 minutes 55 seconds
- Subject: Traditional beliefs and mysteries
- Competition: Short video challenge
- Organiser: Kathmandu Metropolitan City, under the Kathmandu Film Festival
- Entries received: 35
- Theme: My Culture, My Heritage
- Award announced in: Kathmandu
A Challenge Built Around Culture and Heritage
The short video challenge was organised by Kathmandu Metropolitan City as part of the Kathmandu Film Festival, and every participant was asked to work within the theme 'My Culture, My Heritage'. That brief directed creators toward the living traditions, rituals, beliefs and practices that together make up the country's cultural identity. The response was substantial: 35 entries were submitted, each offering its own interpretation of what culture and heritage mean to the people who practise and inherit them.
For a competition of this kind, the theme serves a clear purpose. It pushes filmmakers away from purely abstract exercises and toward material drawn from real communities, whether that material is a ritual performed in a courtyard, a belief carried by word of mouth, or a mystery that a neighbourhood has never fully explained. Bhakunde Bhoot, with its grounding in traditional beliefs and mysteries, fits squarely within that intent, and the judges evidently found its treatment of the subject the most compelling among the 35 entries in the running.
The scale of participation also matters for the challenge itself. Thirty-five submissions represent a wide pool of perspectives on a single theme, and choosing one winner from among them means the winning work had to stand out against dozens of other takes on culture and heritage. In that context, the top award for Bhakunde Bhoot is not simply a recognition of a single film, but a signal of how its approach to tradition resonated more strongly than the rest of the field.
The Short Video Format Takes the Stage
The winning work's brevity is notable in its own right. At just under five minutes, Bhakunde Bhoot belongs to a format that has become an increasingly practical and popular way to tell focused stories. Short videos demand economy: a creator has only a few minutes to establish a world, introduce the beliefs or tensions at play, and leave an impression on the viewer. That Sunuwar achieved this within 4 minutes and 55 seconds, and did so on a subject as layered as traditional belief and mystery, underlines why the format has found a place in a festival setting such as this.
The organisational structure behind the award is equally significant. By placing the short video challenge under the umbrella of the Kathmandu Film Festival, Kathmandu Metropolitan City has tied a formal festival platform to a format that is often associated with informal, online viewing. The arrangement gives short-form creators a recognised stage for their work, while simultaneously steering that work toward subjects of public cultural value. The result, as this year's competition shows, is a body of 35 videos all circling the same theme of culture and heritage, with the best of them now carrying an official festival award.
Recognition for Sunuwar and His Story
For Jeevan Sunuwar, the top award brings recognition for a film that set out to explore traditional beliefs and mysteries, a subject area that is deeply familiar to audiences yet rarely given sustained attention on screen. The honour, announced in Kathmandu, positions Bhakunde Bhoot as the standout entry of the challenge and gives the director a credit with the backing of both the metropolitan city and the Kathmandu Film Festival.
The win also draws attention back to the theme that framed the entire competition. 'My Culture, My Heritage' asked filmmakers to look at the traditions around them, and the victory of Bhakunde Bhoot suggests that stories rooted in old beliefs and unexplained mysteries can compete at the highest level of such a field. As reported by RatoPati, the video's success among 35 entries confirms that there is both an audience and an institutional appetite for short films that keep traditional stories in focus. For the winning film, the next chapter begins with the visibility that comes from being named the best of the challenge, while for the many other entrants, the competition has demonstrated how much creative energy is currently flowing into short-form storytelling about culture and heritage in Kathmandu.
