The long lines at the venue for the screening of Castaway Man at Film Southasia 2015 were a measure of director Kesan Tseten's popularity on his home turf. Two years ago, I had braved similar crowds to watch the director's 2012 documentary, Who Will Be A Gurkha, a riveting and delicate work of observation set in a Gurkha recruitment camp. Similar reflections on Nepali society and its traditions run through Castaway Man. It is a testimony to the filmmaker's skill that he can draw out these themes over such diverse subjects and get to the heart of the matter, while telling an absorbing story.
Castaway Man revolves around the charismatic and contested figure of Dor Bahadur Bista, a leading intellectual, anthropologist and writer. Born to a high-caste Chhetri family in Nepal, Bista's seminal book Fatalism and Development (1991) is the backbone of the film. Broadly, the text argues that the pervasive influence of "hierarchic fatalism" is a key reason that holds back Nepali society. "Development, therefore, can occur only when the Hindu caste system is thoroughly purged of its ʻfatalistic' tendencies," reads a 1994 review of the book. While these thoughts are by no means unfamiliar to other Southasians, Tseten anchors the emotional location of the film in Nepal. The film itself is structured as a mystery; Bista vanished without a trace in 1995, and Castaway Man attempts to find answers linked to this disappearance, as well as everything that the vanished man represented.