Nepal’s ‘Pooja, Sir’ Defeats Cancer to Make Venice Debut (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comNaman Ramachandran When Nepali filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar and actor Asha Magrati were preparing to shoot their latest film “Pooja, Sir” in 2022, life threw them an unexpected curveball.
What started as a concerning throat swelling for Magrati, Rauniyar’s wife and frequent collaborator, during a trip to New York quickly spiraled into a series of cancer diagnoses that threatened not just the film, but Magrati’s life. “We still attended Frontieres,” Rauniyar recalls, referring to the film market in Montreal where they were promoting another project.
But upon returning home to North Carolina, where Rauniyar was teaching at the time, the couple found themselves in a race against time to secure medical care. “It was hard to get doctors, because it didn’t feel urgent for them,” Rauniyar says. “We struggled.
And everybody had bought tickets. They were ready to fly to Nepal, and we were ready to shoot. So we didn’t know what to do.” The first diagnosis came on Aug.
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