Sparsh Ahuja is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist and National Geographic Explorer based in Melbourne.
His work has exhibited in venues such as The Smithsonian, Victoria & Albert and Asian Art Museums, and featured at Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, MUBI, The New Yorker, TIME, The BBC and Al Jazeera amongst others.
Fear and Loathing in Kathmandu traces the dramatic story of Nepal’s transformation - from a 1960s hippie haven where legal cannabis fuelled a thriving counterculture, to a nation unravelled by foreign intervention and civil war. Both a cautionary tale and a story of resilience, Fear and Loathing in Kathmandu captures the tension, tragedy, and hope at the heart of Nepal’s four-decade journey from paradise to battleground.
This film interrogates the racist, politically expedient narratives that shaped global drug policy: why is marijuana demonized, while alcohol — a more harmful drug — is revered as cultural heritage in the West? What happens when Eastern spiritual and medicinal practices are criminalized, only to be repackaged and sold back for profit? Today, white entrepreneurs dominate America’s billion-dollar cannabis industry, while communities in the Global South — and the Black and brown people historically persecuted for the same trade — remain excluded from the windfall.
Through the prism of the 1970s counterculture and the end of the Hippie Trail, Fear and Loathing in Kathmandu reframes Cold War geopolitics not as distant history — but as the foundation of today’s global inequality, showing how imperial power reshaped nations, economies, and culture in its own image.
Director - Sparsh Ahuja
Produced by Gil Marsden (Dreamchaser Entertainment/Den of Martians) and Pallavi Sharda (Bodhini Studios)