Director

ERIC VALLI was born in 1952. He is a filmmaker, photographer and writer. His freelance photographic reportage work appears regularly in the National Geographic Magazine, Geo, Sunday Times Magazine, Life and other magazines in Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, China, India and Australia. His photographs have been exhibited in America and France. Valli's round-the-world trips and reportages have also inspired seven books. In  1988 he directed Chasseurs de miel, co-produced with Alain Majani and Diane Summers, in collaboration with Antenne 2 and the National Geographic Explorer, which received various Festival awards. In 1991, with Chasseurs des ténèbres, he won the Grand Prix at the Trento, Autrans, Antibes and Banff Festivals and received a nomination for the International Emmy Awards as well as one for the 1992 Oscars. Caravan was an Oscar nomination for the Best Foreign Film and has won the Grand Prix in numerous Festivals.

Lost in the vast Himalayan chain, in the Dolpo region, there is a village inhabited by poor hard working peasants who cultivate minute fields of barley.

Their only and main source of income is the salt of Upper Tibet which they extract and exchange, every year, in return for corn cultivated on the other side of the gigantic mountains in the low rich Nepalese valleys.

The journey to exchange salt with corn is an adventurous one along dangerous paths where each step could be fatal.

Men, women and children, with huge herds of yaks, take part in the journey which tests the courage of them all and turns them from simple shy peasants into heroic caravan trekkers.

For weeks, for months, they struggle against the cold, high winds, snowstorms and avalanches, fighting against an extreme and aggressive nature.

Photo
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