SPARSH AHUJA
Sparsh Ahuja is an award-winning filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer working primarily in animation and documentary. A FitzRandolph Scholar in PPE from the University of Oxford, his work explores themes of migration, memory, and geopolitical belonging through a humanistic lens. Sparsh’s work has featured in MUBI, The New Yorker, TIME, The BBC, Al Jazeera, NOWNESS ASIA, NOEMA and The Economist.
Sparsh is the founder of Project Dastaan, a digital humanities initiative reconnecting survivors of the 1947 Partition with their ancestral homes. His documentary short Birdsong premiered at SXSW 2023, was shortlisted for the Grierson, IDA and BIFA Awards, and was acquired by The Guardian as a Vimeo Staff Pick. His VR film Child of Empire - financed through the Venice Biennale Gap Financing Market - premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2022, played Sheffield DocFest, and MIFF, and won the inaugural XR History Award from the Korber-Stiftung Foundation in Hamburg.
In 2023, Sparsh was one of the 12 factual producers selected for VicScreen and Screen Australia’s Originate Factual incubator. In 2024, his reporting on Indigenous land rights disputes was a finalist for the LA Press Club Award.
Sparsh’s work has toured institutions such as The Smithsonian, the Asian Arts Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, BFI Southbank, and ForumDesImages in Paris, and has been supported by the British Council, Australia Council for the Arts, Doc Society, Ford Foundation, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, and the CatchLight Fellowship amongst others.
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BACK | FEAR AND LOATHING IN KATHMANDU
Development Funding by Screen Australia and VicScreen
Director - Sparsh Ahuja
Produced by Gil Marsden (Dreamchaser Entertainment/Den of Martians) and Pallavi Sharda (Bodhini Studios)
Feature Documentary in Development
Fear and Loathing in Kathmandu explores the long shadow of American cultural imperialism.
Over 50 years, the U.S. has spent an estimated one trillion dollars on the War on Drugs — a campaign exported across the Global South with crippling consequences and no demonstrable success. In Nepal, this meant the erasure of ancient cultural traditions, economic devastation, and the collapse of a once-legal cannabis trade, while the U.S. used foreign aid as a tool of control.
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.