A local film that won an award in the Bermuda International Film Festival is now being considered for broadcast on American television.

Andrew Stevenson is a photographer and author of several books published in different languages including ?Annapurna Circuit: Himalayan Journey? and ?Kiwi Tracks? among many others. Now he has turned his talents to making films.

His first film, ?Paving Shangri-La? won an honorary mention at the film festival held recently.

?Paving Shangri-La? is a documentary about Nepal and the negative effects of a new highway on villages previously only reached on foot.

Those who missed the showing of the film during the festival can see it at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI) on April 28 at 7 p.m. and 8.30 p.m.

?Last week I had an hour-long conversation with one of the key people at National Geographic,? Mr. Stevenson told . ?He certainly liked the story. He realised there was a story there. He said he would call me back and I am hoping to hear from him this week.?

Mr. Stevenson said if no big broadcaster takes up the film, he will re-edit the film and then submit it in several major film festivals, with the hope that a broadcaster will see it and take an interest in it.

He put the film together in a make-shift home studio in his two-year-old daughter?s bedroom. To narrate the film, he clipped a microphone to a baseball cap with a clothes peg.

Ironically, it took Mr. Stevenson two days to realise his film had won the award at BIFF.

?I went to the awards ceremony at BIFF,? said Mr. Stevenson. ?They gave my wife a free ticket. I should have been clued in, but I was dead tired from making this film. I left halfway through the evening. Then our phone wasn?t working for a couple of days.?

It wasn?t until he saw the front page of the Saturday that he learned he won an award for ?Paving Shangri-La?.

The award is a particular achievement considering that the film was a first-time effort for Mr. Stevenson. He learned how to use a movie camera on a walking trip through Nepal from Pokhara to Katmandu.

He said that if a broadcaster does show an interest, they will probably want to have professional editors work on the film.

?The ideal thing is if someone bought it I would go on and do more documentaries,? he said. ?I have enough travelogues now that I can tell a story.?

He said that he never intended to make the film all by himself.

?I didn?t think that I could,? he said. ?I started looking around at producers and directors and cameramen in the United States. From the questions that they asked, my gut feeling was I couldn?t imagine them walking into these villages at high altitude eating gruel. You know you are going to be sick ? that is absolutely guaranteed. I knew these people had never lived under these kind of conditions before while making a film. It was going to be a liability.?

He said that today?s sophisticated camera equipment makes it a little easier for first-time filmmakers.

?The most important thing is to have an eye for the light and the composition,? he said. ?For the documentary-maker the most important thing is to have a story. Here the problem is that there is a lot of story and I have to focus on one or two of them.

?There are so many different subtleties of the whole argument about the highway. It is hard for me not to get into it for any great deal of time.?

Filming the documentary while at the same time learning from scratch was not without its setbacks. Each night when he finished walking, he?d look at what he?d filmed on a small battery-powered monitor.

?There would be a wire hanging down in front of the lens that I hadn?t noticed, or the light balance was incorrect,? he said. ?You have to do the light balance correctly. Most of my footage is actually from the latter part of the trip because I was screwing up so badly on the first part of the trip.?

He said that if he?d known what he was up against when he started the project, he might never have done it.

?My biggest advice to people considering making a film is just do it,? he said. ?You don?t necessarily have to go to college for it. Just do it. If you have aptitude then you will rise to the top. If you don?t have any aptitude then no amount of training is going to help you.?

He said the sound for the film was often a problem, particularly because the wind howls at the high altitudes of Nepal.

The high altitude was also a problem for him physically. Like the explorer Sir Edmund Hillary Mr. Stevenson suffers from high-altitude sickness.

?It is a genetic thing,? he said. ?You are either one of those people who suffer or you aren?t. I suffer badly, and I could almost tell you what altitude I am at by the altitude headache I get. It starts at around 11,000 feet. If I don?t stop climbing pretty soon, I will start vomiting. Over the years I have done it so often now, I know that when I get to that height I will be sick. I stop and do day trips going up and then sleeping low, for about a week. Then I have acclimatised. After I have acclimatised I will be better than someone who doesn?t have altitude sickness. I think it is worse for people who are very fit. They tend to push themselves more than other people, and as a result, don?t rest when they should.?

During the trip, Mr. Stevenson walked for about five hours a day for about six weeks.

It is a trek he has made many times over the last two decades and written about in his books. As a result, he has seen many changes in the villages along the way. When he first started trekking this same route in Nepal twenty years ago, the villages were empty. Many young people had gone to the cities to look for opportunities. But the trek had become so popular amongst westerners like Mr. Stevenson that a tourism industry began to develop around the walkers.

A person on foot can only walk so far in a day. Where they commonly stopped, villages were reinvigorated. The young people returned to the villages along the trek and set up businesses. Enough money flooded into the communities that Buddhist monasteries could be reopened or new ones built.

It also created an interest in the mountain wildlife in Nepal. In 1986 the King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation created the Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP).

Mr. Stevenson said that since the highway had come through he?d noticed a negative impact on the environment, including an increase in illegal logging.

?Now if you go to the villages where that road goes through the villagers are really unhappy because there are no tourists stopping there now,? he said. ?The buses go straight through.?

And he said the new tourists brought to the villages at the end of the long bus routes wanted a different kind of tourism, one that included large concrete hotels.

There is also political strife in Nepal. There is a pull between the oppressive monarchy that currently rules and Nepalese Maoists.

?They are just followers of Mao and his revolutions,? said Mr. Stevenson. ?They are the intellectual leaders. But I can guarantee you that most Nepalese who are part of the Maoist insurrection are not communist and they are not Maoists. They are just fed up with the whole system.?

Mr. Stevenson said most Nepalese are very poor and one percent of the population owns 99 percent of the wealth. There are about 25 million people in Nepal.

?The Maoists are supported from within India, not China,? said Mr. Stevenson. ?China is worried about what the Maoists are doing because Nepal is becoming completely unrulable now. It is in a total state of anarchy. It will become India by default.?

The highway is being built because previously roads connecting Nepal to India were blocked by the Indian government.

?In 1990 the Nepalese government bought arms from the Chinese,? said Mr. Stevenson. ?The Indian government was so upset that they blocked off all the access routes to Nepal from India.

?Nepal came to a standstill. They couldn?t get fuel into the country. They couldn?t get supplies. India can at any point just block these roads again and Nepal is helpless. China is worried about that. Nepal which is a relatively large Himalayan country.?

But Mr. Stevenson said along the Annapurna circuit where the western trekkers have been visiting for the last twenty years, the Maoists are not strong, because people are wealthy from the tourism.

During the trip, Mr. Stevenson walked, but he needed a pony to carry his 90 kilograms of equipment.

?They were pretty scraggly ponies, but very, very sure footed,? said Mr. Stevenson. ?That is why they do very well.?

During the film Mr. Stevenson uses the haunting music of Nepalese musicians.

?They are a very musical people,? said Mr. Stevenson. ?These poor people have the highest death rates of under five years old in the world and one of the poorest countries in the world and they are always singing.?

Tickets to the BIFF showing at the BUEI are available online at www.boxoffice.com or at the Bermuda Bookstore.