Nepali Drama Shirjara Seeks Final $44,000 at Tokyo Market

A Nepali feature that has finished shooting is looking for its last $44,000 in Tokyo this week. The film, Shirjara: Song of Grandmother, is directed by Bikash Subedi, and its team is pitching it at the Tokyo Gap-Financing Market, according to Variety.

The market runs from 28 to 30 October 2026 as part of TIFFCOM, the content market attached to the Tokyo International Film Festival. Gap financing is the money a film still needs to finish after its main funding is in place. At this event, filmmakers pitch projects to potential partners who might cover that final gap. This year's edition is the seventh, held at Tokyo Port City Takeshiba Port Studio, and it lists 24 projects. Screen Daily reported that Shirjara was selected for the lineup.

The film has a total budget of $296,000. According to Variety, 85 per cent of that has already been raised and spent. The remaining money goes on digital colour grading, picture finishing, the master DCP (the final digital copy that cinemas play from), and a six-minute sequence made with AI and visual effects.

Filming took place at roughly 4,000 metres in Dhorpatan, a high-altitude area of western Nepal, using an Arri Alexa 35 camera. The team has assembled an 80-minute rough cut, which is an early full version of the film that editors will refine. Subash Bhusal of Kingdom Network Pvt. Ltd. is the producer.

Subedi calls his approach AnI Cinema, short for Ancestral Intelligence. The team says the film uses AI as part of its storytelling, and Variety reports that it is aiming for a premiere at Cannes in 2027.

In Tokyo, the team is looking for four kinds of partner: Japanese co-producers, post-production companies to help finish the picture, an international sales company to sell it to buyers abroad, and distributors in Asia to bring it to cinemas. Each of those roles can shape where a film travels after it leaves the edit suite. Sales companies, for example, usually handle deals with buyers across different countries, and distributors decide when and how a film reaches local audiences.

For a small production, a gap-financing market is often the last major stop before a film is finished. Deals struck there tend to take months to close, so the outcome of this week will not be known for some time. The team's next public milestone is the Cannes goal, which is still more than a year away.