Filmed over seven years, Drawing The Tiger is a intimate portrait of a family in rural Nepal who get a chance to break their cycle of poverty: Their brightest child is awarded a scholarship to attend school in the city. When she doesn't return home, the family is forced to survive without her or the opportunity they believed would change their fate.
Drawing the Tiger, The girl in the distance
After winning a scholarship, Shanta had to move from her impoverished rural village in order to forge a promising future in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. The years have passed and for her family the presence of Shanta materializes only in a photograph that is getting increasingly blurry.
The ethnographic approach of filmmakers Amy Benson and Scott Squire, illustrated with a beautiful cinematography, paints two contrasting realities of a family that is proud that Shanta may be the first woman in the village to graduate, although that would mean to set apart from her indefinitely.