Returning to her roots | Nihaarika Negi's 'TENFA'
Nihaarika Negi's TENFA is a community effort and one of the first films to be shot in the endangered Kinnauri language
Writer-director Nihaarika Negi is Kinnauri on her father’s side, and TENFA, her debut short, was made the only way she believed it honestly could be—with her own community as collaborators and subjects. The film follows three generations of women—a midwife, a grandmother and a teenager—trekking through the mountains of Kinnaur in search of a herb that could save a pregnant woman’s life, guided only by a half-remembered folk song. Negi’s family forms the cast. The people of her village make up the crew. The story began with her aunt, who spent years as a midwife in some of Kinnaur’s most isolated villages.
Writer-director Nihaarika Negi is Kinnauri on her father’s side, and TENFA, her debut short, was made the only way she believed it honestly could be—with her own community as collaborators and subjects. The film follows three generations of women—a midwife, a grandmother and a teenager—trekking through the mountains of Kinnaur in search of a herb that could save a pregnant woman’s life, guided only by a half-remembered folk song. Negi’s family forms the cast. The people of her village make up the crew. The story began with her aunt, who spent years as a midwife in some of Kinnaur’s most isolated villages.
TENFA (the word means ‘gift’ in Kinnauri) had its world premiere at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) in April this year. Now, Negi wants to bring it back to the community that made it. That is the spirit behind ‘Before the Mountains Forget’, a tour spotlighting Kinnaur’s vanishing indigenous knowledge and languages. Negi doesn’t see them as conventional screenings. “These are participatory cultural gatherings, rooted in the same traditions of oral history and intergenerational knowledge-sharing that TENFA itself is about.” Running from June 25 to July 4, the tour included screenings in Delhi on June 25 and 26 at the Press Club of India and Alliance Franaise, alongside community screenings in Kinnaur and further stops in Jaipur and Chandigarh. “Rather than serving as an endpoint, the idea is for film to function as a catalyst for dialogue, reflection and collective remembering,” adds Negi.
Produced by Storiculture, the team behind Humans in the Loop (2024), Taak (2024) and Auto Queens (2025), TENFA is one of the first narrative works made in the Kinnauri language.
