Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s 2006 film “Still Life” has emerged as an unexpected mirror for Nepal’s contemporary housing displacement crisis, offering artistic documentation of how state-mandated demolitions reshape urban landscapes and displace vulnerable populations. The film, shot in the Three Gorges region during China’s massive hydroelectric dam project, presents unflinching portraits of individuals losing homes and livelihoods to development—a narrative that resonates starkly with the experiences of squatters and informal settlers facing eviction across Kathmandu and other Nepali cities.
“Still Life” depicts the human cost of infrastructure-driven displacement through observational cinematography and long, contemplative shots that allow viewers to absorb the emotional weight of loss. The film documents residents salvaging belongings from crumbling homes, demolition crews erasing entire neighbourhoods, and individuals grappling with sudden uprootedness. Rather than employing melodrama, Zhangke’s approach renders displacement as banal—a bureaucratic inevitability presented with visual and emotional precision. The film’s aesthetic choices transform what might otherwise be dry policy documentation into profound social commentary on the relationship between state development imperatives and individual survival.
Nepal’s urban eviction landscape operates within similar structural dynamics, though with distinctly local contexts. Kathmandu and Pokhara have witnessed accelerating demolition drives targeting informal settlements in recent years, often justified through city beautification initiatives, infrastructure expansion, or land reclamation projects. Unlike China’s centrally coordinated Three Gorges relocation, Nepal’s evictions typically occur piecemeal, driven by municipal authorities, private developers, or landowners seeking to formalize property claims. Yet the outcome remains comparable: families lose housing without adequate compensation or relocation support, informal workers lose income sources, and urban poor populations become increasingly precarious. Squatter communities, numbering in the tens of thousands across the Kathmandu Valley, face particular vulnerability given the absence of formal land tenure and minimal legal protections.
The thematic parallels extend beyond surface-level displacement. Zhangke’s film emphasizes how demolition erases not merely structures but entire ecosystems of social relations, informal economies, and cultural memory. Squatter settlements in Nepal similarly function as functional communities with internal economies, social networks, and established patterns of daily life. When authorities move to clear these areas, they dismantle these systems without corresponding institutional alternatives. Former residents—rickshaw pullers, domestic workers, small vendors, and labourers—depend on spatial proximity to their livelihood sources. Displacement distances them from employment networks and increases transportation costs, directly impacting household economics. The psychological dimension of losing one’s home compounds these material hardships, yet remains largely invisible in policy frameworks that treat eviction as neutral urban optimization.
Film scholars and human rights advocates argue that Zhangke’s work provides essential documentation precisely because formal governmental and development sector records typically exclude affected populations’ perspectives. The film grants visual presence and temporal space to experiences that official narratives render invisible or justify as necessary sacrifices for progress. In Nepal’s context, similar artistic and journalistic documentation remains sparse. Local filmmakers and cultural workers have produced limited cinematic engagement with eviction realities, leaving policy discourse dominated by developer and municipal perspectives. The absence of sustained artistic attention allows eviction narratives to remain abstracted from lived experience, facilitating governance approaches that deprioritize relocation support or affected-population consultation.
The comparison also illuminates how displacement operates as a technology of urban reconfiguration. Both China’s Three Gorges project and Nepal’s property formalization drives employ displacement as a mechanism for remaking cities according to state-preferred spatial orders. In Nepal, eviction simultaneously serves multiple purposes: enabling land value extraction for investors, facilitating municipal revenue collection, and removing visible poverty from tourist-facing urban zones. These overlapping motivations create political coalitions supporting displacement, including municipal governments, developers, and property owners—constituencies typically absent from affected communities’ negotiating tables. Zhangke’s film implicitly critiques this power asymmetry by insisting on depicting displaced individuals as protagonists rather than obstacles to development.
Nepal’s policy environment remains poorly equipped to manage displacement with human dignity protections comparable to international standards. Resettlement frameworks, where they exist, typically offer inadequate compensation and minimal support for livelihood restoration. Affected populations lack institutionalized mechanisms for appeal or negotiation. Legal ambiguities surrounding squatter rights—contested between municipal authorities, land claimants, and residents themselves—leave vulnerable populations exposed to rapid eviction without due process safeguards. International development organizations have periodically flagged these gaps, yet local policy reform has proceeded incrementally. The disconnect between Nepal’s development ambitions and displacement management capacity suggests that Zhangke’s cinematic examination of human costs remains perpetually relevant, serving as indirect indictment of governance failure.
Looking forward, Nepal faces mounting pressures to formalize urban land markets and accelerate infrastructure development, dynamics that will likely intensify displacement activity. The question remains whether Nepal’s cultural and policy sectors will develop more sophisticated engagement with the human dimensions of this transformation. Artistic documentation such as Zhangke’s work suggests that cinema can function as a space for rendering visible what policy frameworks render invisible—a particularly valuable contribution given Nepal’s limited tradition of advocacy cinema. Whether Nepali filmmakers will produce comparable documentation of contemporary evictions remains an open question, but the comparative frame that “Still Life” provides offers both an artistic model and an implicit challenge to governance approaches that treat displacement as inevitable rather than contestable.
