I have just received the Golden Award for Cinematography 2025 from the Golden Fern Film Awards in Darjeeling. The jury said my feature film The Blinding Sea is “one of the ten best films to have been submitted to the festival in the last five years.”
This comes as a great honour.
India has such a wonderful cinema culture, and northern India, at least, is known for its challenging mountain conditions. When submitting my film, I figured the audience in Darjeeling, at the foot of the Himalayas, would be able to relate to the story in my film of Roald Amundsen, Canadian Inuit and other people exploring in extreme polar environments.
On a clear day, you can see Kanchenjunga from Darjeeling. This sacred mountain has five summits, the tallest of which is 8,586 metres or 28,169 feet (making it the third-highest summit in the world). The name “Kanchenjunga” means “the Five Treasures of the High Snow” and originates from the Tibetan words “gangs” pronounced [kaŋ], meaning snow and ice; “chen”, pronounced [tɕen] meaning great; “mdzod”, meaning treasure; and “lnga”, meaning five.
Now that the newly revised version of the film has been released, I am gearing up for a worldwide marketing campaign this Fall.
