Sona Dhwandi Bhed Te Suchha Pahad

The first part of the film is loaded with deeply valuable insights into the social and physiological life of underrepresented parts of the society - out of status quo of right and wrong. The second part is no less impressive than Abbas Kiarostami's poetic musing about the search for something deeper and mysterious. Symbology is simple yet powerful and mystery is eternal.

It doesn't aim to speak to the mind. It pushes away the logic and dives deeper into the heart realm. It tells the story of two characters who on the outside seemingly different and yet in search for the same thing, without knowing, without recognising it within the other, both consumed and filled with the pull of the mystery.

It can take some time to process and digest the movie but the extended stillness of its scenes will allow you ample time to contemplate. The movie plays with the user's imagination by creating room for a wide breadth of subjectivity.

For e.g., it builds an irony by first presenting the idea that conscience is a mountain in an ocean thus signifying that mental stability has to be a rock as everything else can be daunting dynamic flowing in which an unsturdy mind may lose itself. When this statement was made in the film, we see visual poetry, of the old shepherd's face's fixed reflection ebbing and flowing on the ripples of a water body by which he stood.

At the very next moment, the movie shows the old shepherd struggling to find the reward against the harsh mountainous landscape. Now when the metaphorical ocean is a mountain then what will the mind need to be? Thus not getting the reward is a reality those living in harsh mountainous regions have to live with. The other shepherds constantly maintain the refrain that those not deserving won't get what they seek thus ending up judging those living in the mountains even more harshly who are set up against an unforgiving landscape to begin with where the risk reward equation doesn't function as rosily as it may in urban centres.

The assistant to the old shepherd who had his personal delusions of discovering a gold laden sheep, and who was prone to find the old shepherd's criticism as unwarranted ends up with a near catastrophic result - unconscious and perhaps with a broken bone.

There's some beautiful photography of a snow-laden mountain top and the happenings atop it in The Gold-Laden Sheep & the Sacred Mountain that is far more exciting than the proceedings that revolve around a crashlanding aircraft and its unknown wreckage, different rescue teams looking for its members, and two shepherds who organically join the teams in the quest, all while being haunted by an urban myth. TN.

(Watched and reviewed at a private screening at the MAMI Year Round Programme at PVR Juhu, Mumbai.)