Nepal film production guides

The guides go deep on one topic each: permits, seasons, altitude, road and air transport, equipment and customs, national parks, cost drivers, and how to write a first brief that gets a useful reply. This page is the map. It tells you what each guide covers, the order to read them in, and roughly when in your planning each one earns its place, so you are not reading about drone approvals in week one or arguing about day rates before you have checked whether the season even works.

One caution runs through everything here and it is worth stating before you start. Categories, the routing between authorities, fees and timescales all change, sometimes without notice. Nothing on this site is a current fee schedule or a promise about an outcome. Treat every guide as the shape of the problem, then confirm the current position for your own dates and locations before you commit money you cannot get back.

These guides assume you are planning a shoot, not reading for pleasure. Each one is built around a question a production actually asks, and each is written to be useful whether or not you ever hire anyone in Nepal, including us. If you read the permits guide, work out that your project sits in a harder category than you assumed, and change the plan before you spend a rupee, the guide has done its job even if we never speak.

The mistake the library is designed to prevent is the most common one. A producer prices and schedules a Nepal shoot from the shot list, then discovers that the country, not the shoot, sets the terms. The shooting days are usually the cheap and easy part. The days around them, spent getting to a location, waiting on weather, acclimatising, clearing kit and holding permissions you do not yet have, are where budgets and schedules actually go.

So use the guides in roughly the order your plan needs them, not front to back. Start with feasibility, which means permits and cost, because those two decide whether the story is affordable at all. Then fix the window against the season and the festival calendar. Then build the schedule around altitude and road time, confirm access location by location, and only then get into equipment paperwork and the fine detail of a first brief.

Read actively. A guide is only worth the time if it changes a document you are already writing: your schedule, your budget or your risk register. If a page tells you something you cannot act on, skim it. If it makes you move a shoot day, cut a case of kit, or warn a commissioner about approval risk while it is still a risk, it has earned its place. And read everything as background rather than the current position, because the whole point of a local is that they know today what a website cannot.

Two questions sit in front of all the others, and they are best answered together. What permission does the project need, and what will the shape of it cost. Answer those honestly and you know whether the film in the treatment is the film you can actually make. Skip them and every later decision rests on a guess.

Permission first, because it sets the category, and category sets almost everything downstream. Nepal does not issue one filming permit. It issues a stack, and which layers apply depends on what you say you are making and where you intend to point the camera. A broadcast documentary, a commercial, a feature, a stills commission and a news report are not treated as one thing, and declaring the wrong category is a worse problem than declaring an expensive one. The permits guide walks through the stack layer by layer and tells you who is allowed to file, which is usually an entity registered in Nepal rather than the foreign production itself.

Cost second, because the biggest budget drivers are not on a rate card. They are in the treatment. How many total days on the ground per person, how far the location sits from the last sealed road, whether aircraft are involved, what the kit weighs once it becomes loads on someone’s back, and how much of the schedule can move when the weather does. The cost guide explains why the shooting day is the wrong unit and the day on cost is the right one, and why bringing every case you own can quietly cost you money on every day of the trip rather than once at the border.

Read together, the two guides let you do the single most valuable thing at this stage. Work out that a project sits in a harder or dearer category than you assumed, and change the plan while changing it is still free.

Two calendars govern a Nepal schedule and neither of them is in your spreadsheet. Learn to read both before you argue about anything else, because between them they decide the window, and the window decides most of the cost.

The first is the weather. The monsoon, roughly June to September, tends to sit cloud on the hills and can take the mountains out of frame for days at a time, whatever the light is doing at ground level. The great exception is the rain shadow north of the main range, where Mustang, Dolpo, Manang, Nar Phu and Humla receive a fraction of the rainfall and can be workable, though the legs in and out still pass through country that is firmly inside the monsoon. October and November give the clearest air of the year, which is exactly why lodges, internal flights and experienced crew are booked out and why prices climb. December to February is clear and cold, with short usable light in the valleys and high passes closed. March to May brings warmth and long days, but also dust, crop burning and hill fires that can flatten a long lens view of a mountain range for weeks.

The second calendar is the official one. Government offices have generally run a Sunday to Friday week with Saturday closed and Friday often short, though working patterns have been under review, so confirm rather than assume. Nepal keeps a great many public holidays, and the big autumn festivals, Dashain and Tihar, close much of the administration and empty Kathmandu for a stretch, on lunar dates that move every year. Official dates run on the Bikram Sambat calendar, so a date written on a document is not the date you assume unless someone has converted it.

The season guide takes this month by month. The point to carry away here is simple. Settle the window against both calendars before anyone books a flight or debates a day rate.

Three physical facts about Nepal break more schedules than any office does. Roads are slow, mountain flying is fragile, and the air thins fast. Two guides cover them in depth, the transport guide and the altitude guide, and they are best read as a pair because a schedule has to answer all three at once.

Distance means nothing here without road condition. Kathmandu to Pokhara is roughly 200 kilometres and you should plan a day. The main highways are largely single carriageway, shared with freight, and exposed to landslide, roadworks and diversion, especially during and after the monsoon. A number on a map tells you nothing until someone who drove that section recently tells you the surface and the current closures. Every transfer estimated from a map quietly deletes a shooting day you have already paid for.

Internal flights are a scheduling tool with rules of their own. Mountain strips fly in the morning, in weather, with weight limits that bite once camera cases are added, and a grounded flight puts the whole party on full daily cost while the operator works through a backlog. Helicopters solve timing and create budget. They are weather and weight limited, they carry their own permissions, and they promise nothing.

Then the air itself. Above roughly 3,000 metres, altitude stops being a location note and becomes a constraint on the schedule. Acclimatisation days are not contingency, they are days you are not shooting, set by the body rather than the delivery date. Crews work more slowly, batteries drain faster, and rotors and drones lose lift. The altitude guide is blunt about this because the alternative is a crew that cannot ascend as fast as the call sheet assumes, which is a problem no amount of money fixes once the unit is in the hills.

It is worth saying once, plainly, because it reshapes how people plan. National filming permission is not access. It is the top layer of a stack, and the layer where days are actually lost sits much lower down.

At the top is national filming permission, normally applied for by an entity registered in Nepal and assessed differently depending on whether you are making a broadcast documentary, a commercial, a feature, a stills shoot or news. News frequently sits outside the film route altogether, on journalist accreditation and a matching visa category, which is why the permits guide keeps visa and permission as two separate questions and warns against assuming a tourist visa will do.

Underneath, national parks and conservation areas run their own regime, and they are not all administered by the same authority, which is the whole reason the parks guide exists. Restricted areas near the northern border are handled through immigration and issued against a named route and a fixed date window, so they do not quietly follow a schedule that slips, and they typically require a registered local agency and a government liaison officer travelling with the party. Heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley each sit with their own trust or committee. Drone work is a separate approval track again, involving aviation authorities, home affairs and the local district administration, with outright prohibitions in some parks and around some sites.

Then comes the layer nobody budgets for. The district administration, the ward office, local police, community forest user groups and whoever owns the ground you want to stand on. A national permission does not oblige a village, a monastery or a landowner to let you film. That consent is local, it is human, and it is arranged on the ground. Plan so that a refusal or a delay at any single layer costs you a location, not the whole shoot, and keep a fallback that runs on a different permission.

The topics in this library do not sit in separate boxes. They pull on each other, and a decision in one guide almost always changes a number in another. Reading them as a connected set is the point.

Season pulls on altitude. The clear autumn window that gives you mountain views is also the busy window that competes for the flights and crew a high shoot depends on. Altitude pulls on cost. Every acclimatisation day is a day the whole party is on cost without a frame shot, and every extra day at the top can move your slot on the flight out. Cost pulls on permits. Category decides which permissions apply, and a liaison officer or a restricted area route is a budget line before it is a paperwork one. Permits pull on transport. A permission tied to a fixed date window does not forgive a road that closes or a flight that does not go. Transport pulls back on season, and the loop closes.

So when a guide sends you to another, follow the link rather than filing it for later. If the cost guide tells you that distance from the road head is the biggest multiplier, the transport guide tells you how to read that distance in hours and loads. If the altitude guide tells you to build the schedule from sleeping altitudes upward, the season guide tells you which weeks make that profile flyable at all. The first-brief guide, in a sense, is the whole library compressed into one message. It lists what to tell a local so they can answer the questions the other guides raise.

None of it commits you to anything. Read the set, and you can plan a competent shoot on your own, or brief someone to run it for you with your eyes open.

These pages are written plainly, to be useful to a producer who never contacts anyone here. The service pages elsewhere on this site describe what a fixer does. The guides exist so that you can plan competently without one, or brief one properly if you decide to use one.

Two rules govern every page. Nothing that changes without notice is stated as settled fact, which is why you will not find fee tables or guaranteed processing times presented as current anywhere in the library. And nothing is promised that no company controls: not a permit approval, not the weather, not a flight, not access, not wildlife, not safety, not how a given person will cope with altitude. Where a claim would need a specific figure or a guarantee we cannot honestly give, the guide gives you the process and the realistic read instead.

You will also notice what the guides refuse to do. They will not quote a firm all-in price from a one-line brief, because the variables that move the number most all live in the treatment. They will not tell you a permit takes a set number of days, because that depends on category, season, location and the office on the day. They will not tell you the weather on your dates, because nobody can. What they will do is describe the odds, and the odds are the only thing anyone can plan against.

If a guide makes you change your plan before you have spent money, it has worked. That is the whole ambition of the library, and the reason it is free to read.

Nepal is not one culture but a dense weave of many, with over a hundred languages spoken across its ethnic groups and a religious life in which Hindu and Buddhist practice often sit side by side in the same courtyard. A crew that understands this gets access no permit grants, because the last and most important permission on any shoot is the human one, given by the person whose doorway, field or shrine you want to point a camera at.

Some conventions are worth learning before you land. Remove your shoes before entering temples and homes. Walk clockwise around stupas and mani walls, keeping them on your right. Ask before you photograph people, monks, sadhus and the inside of shrines, and accept that some sites and ceremonies are closed to cameras entirely, whatever your paperwork says. The right hand is used for giving and receiving. Feet are considered unclean, so do not point them at people or step over someone seated. A cremation on the ghats is not a photo opportunity, and treating it as one will end your welcome fast.

Language helps more than any fee. Nepali is the common tongue, but in the hills and the high valleys the first language is often Tamang, Gurung, Sherpa, Newar, Magar, Thakali or one of dozens more, and English thins out the further you get from the tourist trail. A few words of greeting, a fixer who speaks the local language, and the patience to let an elder or a committee say yes in their own time are worth more than any amount of pressure.

None of this is soft advice. Community consent is a real layer of the access stack, and a village, a monastery or a landowner can close a location that every government office has already approved. Crews that arrive quietly, explain honestly what they are making, employ local people fairly and leave a place as they found it are the crews that get invited back. The reputation you leave behind is the access the next production inherits.

Safety in Nepal is mostly a planning problem, not a bravery one, and the risks that actually hurt productions are the mundane ones. Road travel is statistically the most dangerous thing most crews do here, so choose vehicles and drivers on their condition and reputation rather than their quote, build in daylight driving where you can, and never let a schedule pressure a driver into a night descent on a wet mountain road. Altitude illness is the other predictable hazard, and it is predictable: it follows how fast you ascend, not how fit you are, which is why the altitude guide treats acclimatisation as non-negotiable and why a sensible plan always knows where the nearest descent and the nearest help are.

Insurance is where hope meets the small print. Standard travel and production policies often exclude or cap exactly the things a Nepal shoot leans on: trekking above a certain altitude, helicopter evacuation, and remote-area rescue. Read the altitude ceilings and the evacuation cover line by line before you fly, get the cover confirmed in writing, and make sure every person on the ground, local crew and porters included, is actually covered rather than assumed to be. Evacuation from a high or roadless location is a helicopter problem, and a helicopter that will not launch without a guarantee of payment is not cover, it is a conversation you do not want to have at altitude.

Responsibility is the part that outlasts your shoot. Carry out what you carry in, because waste does not disappear in the mountains, it sits there. Respect wildlife distances in the parks and never bait or crowd an animal for a shot. Employ local people, pay fairly, and load porters within humane limits rather than to the edge of what a body can bear. None of this is decoration on the plan. It is the reason the next crew is welcome, and it is the standard any honest local production holds itself to. Nothing here is a guarantee of safety, which no one can give, but planning against the real risks is how you shift the odds in your favour.