At the heart of the Ladakhi documentary, Nomads Under the Stars, lies not just a landscape, but a worldview—one where identity is collective, memory is oral, and survival is deeply entwined with nature. Directed by Ladakhi filmmaker Stanzin Dorjai Gya, and made in collaboration with Jungwa Foundation and Korzok Monastery, the film traces the lives of the Changpas of Korzok Tegazung, a nomadic pastoral community living along the sacred Tso Moriri lake in eastern Ladakh’s Changthang plateau.
Stanzin frames the Changpas’ philosophy simply yet profoundly: “They always say ‘we’, they hardly say ‘I’, because it includes not only humans but all the sheep, goats, yaks, and wild animals.” This sense of shared existence shapes everything—from seasonal migration to rituals, from grief to celebration.
Shot over six years, the 69-minute film captures not just breathtaking terrain but the quiet anxieties of a changing climate. Elders speak of shifts that are both subtle and catastrophic. “Glaciers are melting year by year, so shepherds have to travel further for water,” Stanzin says. “But baby goats and sheep are too small to walk that far, and that is why the shepherds sometimes lose their animals.” Snowfall, once predictable, has turned erratic: “There is snow in March, April, and sometimes May.” The most haunting memory remains 2013: “More than 20,000 sheep and goats died because of the heavy snow. I have used archival footage from then in the film.”
The film works like what Stanzin calls “a living encyclopaedia, a living library.” It foregrounds knowledge that rarely enters formal education—how to read landscapes, predict weather, and survive in extreme conditions. “The knowledge of the elderly nomad is practical and scientific,” he says. “If we do not record their stories now, we will lose all their knowledge.” Yet even as the film preserves memory, reality is shifting. Younger Changpas are moving to cities for education and employment, leaving elders to sustain both herds and heritage.
The documentary resists romanticising nomadic life as something distant or exotic. “It should not be viewed as exotic or exclusionary,” Stanzin insists. “In modern textbooks, there is not a single word about their culture or way of life.”
For Stanzin, the story is also deeply personal. Reflecting on his childhood in the village Gya, he says: “I used to feel that my life was very tough, but now I feel that my sheep, yak, and goats are my classmates. The valleys are my school; the wolf, the snow leopard, and eagles are my friends.” The line quietly reframes hardship as education, and isolation as a form of belonging.
Nomads Under the Stars ultimately asks what happens when a way of life disappears not because it failed, but because the world around it changed too quickly. In listening to the Changpas, the film suggests that what is at stake is not just a community, but entire ways of knowing—and ways of being—that modern life has yet to replace.