Unapologetically therapeutic, this ethereal documentary retraces a hiking trip that a Taiwanese couple took into the Himalayas, before they went missing.
After the Snowmelt is definitely not a straightforward account of events, although the premise may suggest that it will be. Two close friends of filmmaker Yo-Shan Lo – Chen-Chun Liu and Sheng-Yueh Liang – went missing in 2017 on a hike to Mount Everest. They were found 47 days afterwards, and one of them had miraculously survived the ordeal.
The search party set off at the request of director Yi-Shan Lo, which we see at the start of the film. The conversation between Yi-Shan and the organisation that found her friends is accompanied by contemplative images of the snowy landscapes of Nepal – setting the tone for the cinematic odyssey upon which we are about to embark.
The film then jumps forward, when Yi-Shan and Yueh are on a hiking trip, camping out in the woods. Yi-Shan is reflecting on the death of their friend, trying to find answers in the letter Chun wrote to her in the days before she died, trapped in a cave. She is also trying to squeeze information out of Yueh, who is shrugging off the questions with a smile and cliches about the past being the past. He is actively denying his emotions and we can only guess how he must have felt on the side of that mountain, watching his lover die. But he does share a promise that he and Chun made to each other while awaiting rescue: the survivor had to share their story.
Yi-Shan is determined to do this in honour of her high school friend and in an attempt to find peace of mind for herself. So she travels to Nepal to reconstruct the fatal journey – tracing the people who last saw her friend. She organically weaves together this reconstruction with Chun’s manuscripts (which ponder a lot on the meaning of life, death and love), photos of Chun and Yueh, travel photos they both took and, in the end, footage of the rescue.
Deliberately or otherwise, by letting past and present, and fact and reflection, melt together, all tied within a minimalistic, meditative soundtrack, the film has a disorienting but strangely soothing effect. You sometimes feel you don’t know where you are in time and space. Much like the young couple must have felt when they were caught out by bad weather. This is not a bad thing, as it allows you to wander around in Chun’s and Yi-Shan’s ruminations and walk in their shoes. It is a mesmerising trip – the stories of the people she encounters paint a picture of her friends and of their love for one another. The filming of Yi-Shan’s hike to the place where they were found takes you right there. The views of the area are both stunning and healing in a way – the omnipresence of the mountains that have been there forever puts the death of a human being into perspective.
In the end, Yi-Shan might not have experienced the dramatic catharsis in the way she was hoping for as a filmmaker. But she managed to create a sincere and heartfelt document of her grief and of her lost friend. After the Snowmelt is a beautiful, poetic reflection on loss and death, bringing solace not only to its maker but to everyone who mourns the unexpected loss of a loved one.
2024, Taiwan/Japan, 110 minutes
Director Lo Yi-Shan
Producers Lo Yi-Shan, Yung Shuang Chen and Tze-Lan Cho
Editor Lin Jessica Wan-Yu
Cinematography Yi-Shan Lo, Wei-Long Tsai
Sound design Yannick Dauby
Music Wen-Cheng Shen
World sales: Square Eyes
