PÖFF 2025: Goodbye Sisters | Interview with Alexander Murphy

Alexander Murphy had his debut feature premiere at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. His moving documentary Goodbye Sisters about a young Nepalese woman Jamuna who comes from a village so remote that it takes her 5 hours to reach Kathmandu has decided to continue her education and life in Japan. Murphy joins her on her trip back to her village in order to say her goodbyes to her sisters and her parents. It’s a magnificently shot documentary that impresses in visual frames as well as editing that are building blocks to an emotional, nostalgic story that despite the grim reality amazes with its beauty and its heart, just like Jamuna herself.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: Thank you so much for this interview, Alex, and welcome to Tallinn. Did you just arrive? Have you had the chance to look around a bit yet?

Alexander Murphy: Yeah, I arrived last night at one o’clock in the morning, so didn’t really have a chance to see anything and had a couple of meetings this morning. So, I’m really excited to look around and discover the city.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: Let’s deal with business first and then you can enjoy your time. And your premiere is tonight, is it?

Alexander Murphy: Yes, it’s tonight. I’m really excited. I feel like a kid, you know, a young kid starting school in a way. It’s kind of cool and exciting, but at the same time, a little bit nervous.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: From my point of view, there’s nothing to be nervous about. Thank you so much for this beautiful film. So to start off, how did you meet Jamuna and her family? How did you meet your protagonists and what drew you to their story?

Alexander Murphy: At the beginning, it started with just a fascination with the environment. Hundreds of tents up high up in the mountains, people collecting this magic mushroom called yazagumba that’s worth more than gold, you know. There was something quite extraordinary about it. But to be honest, I was it wasn’t my thing to make a film about a mushroom.

But I said to myself, if I could find a character that had a story that was linked to the yazagumba, then maybe we had a story there. So, I went to the village where they harvest yazagumba in 2019 in search of that character. I ended up in this village called Mailkot. And I saw this young girl with round glasses, a bit different from the others. I was like, she’s interesting. Let’s talk to her. And that was Jamuna.

I stayed there for a couple of days, spending time with the family, the chief of the village, and I got to know Jamuna and I thought, she was so kind and she had such an incredible energy and such an incredible young girl.

From the moment I met Jamuna, I knew she was special, she had an incredible energy. At sixteen, she was working double shifts in Kathmandu, taking care of her sister, and still sending money back home to help her parents and siblings.

Jamuna didn’t really have a childhood. At a very young age, she was sent to Kathmandu with her little sister, Anmuna. They ended up in a horrible orphanage, where they were really badly treated. They tried to escape several times and finally, they did. Since then, it’s just been the two of them, doing their best to survive in Kathmandu which, as you know, is a crazy city, with very little opportunities.

I admire Jamuna’s courage to refuse the life that’s been laid out for her in Nepal, and daring to fight for the future she wants.

The film is an intimate glimpse at what immigration really means all the sacrifices behind it, the goodbyes without a return ticket. We often see what happens after, but we rarely see the before, that moment when you leave your home, your country, heading into the unknown, saying goodbye without knowing if you’ll ever see your loved ones again.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: And how did she and especially her family agree to participate in this project?

Alexander Murphy: I think Jamuna wanted to tell her story. I think for her it was really important and I was able to make a film because I didn’t make this film by myself. I did it with Jamuna. She was involved from the very beginning in the story and how we were going to tell it. It’s a very universal subject, but I wanted it to be told by the girls and not by me. So immediately she was involved. 

And the parents… To be honest, I spent like three or four days with them when I got there, we had to do something really like easy going and very natural and they accepted me so that by the end of filming I felt like the big brother of the family. So from the first day we had that connection. It was just easy. The camera was never an issue and that’s how I got so much intimacy and that’s how I was able to get so close to them.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: I knew coming into the movie that it was a documentary. But then when it started, I thought this couldn’t be a documentary. It had to be a fiction film. All of the scenes sort of fit in very well together. And the look of the film is so beautiful, so poetic. And then when I started reading about it again, I confirmed it was a documentary. And I was really struck by it twice in a way by the story itself and then by the factuality of it and I was wondering how did you capture such beautiful striking images? What do you remember from the shoot? Did you know when you were taking it that it was going to look so beautiful or was it due to the editing process?

Alexander Murphy:  No, I knew from the very beginning it was going to be like this because first of all, I was lucky enough to work with this incredible DOP, Vadim Alsayed. I called him and said we needed to get these incredible images. And for me, the aesthetic of the film was really important as well. And I was able to get that because of a back-and-forth conversation with Jamuna all the time. 

I didn’t want to make a film by myself and Jamuna trusted me in my process and how I wanted to make the film. That’s how was able to capture these moments. And my plan was that the higher we got up in the mountains, the closer I wanted to be with them. So at the end, I was using a wide-angle lens to be so close to them.

I wanted to be with them during that ascension and I wanted to have as much background and information about the environment as I could. I was able to get that because we spent so much time prior to the shoot talking about the film, trying to get it, trying to understand what exactly we’re going to talk about because from the get-go I tried to communicate that we weren’t making a film about collecting and harvesting yazagumba, we’re making a film about your story and she really wanted to tell that story and that’s how we were able to get those images.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: What you’re saying really rings true for me as a viewer, because when they’re in their tent near the end, you really feel like you’re sitting with them or you’re one of the family. I find the film also very striking because I’ve recently had to move, so it spoke to me personally. Would you say that in a way and in what way it spoke to you?

Alexander Murphy: I was inspired by Jamuna and I felt like this film was about a young girl trying to get control of her future in a city where there’s no opportunities and the only way is a way out. That’s her only option. And even then, she needs to fight for it. Nothing is a given, nothing comes for free.

It’s an intimate glimpse into what immigration really means and what was really powerful to me was the sacrifice and what it means to say goodbye without a return ticket, you know? Because usually we see what happens after. We rarely see what happens before and the consequences of saying goodbye to your country, to your home, to your loved ones, to your parents without knowing if you’re going to see them ever again…  The courage of this girl from the very start of her life untill now, it’s always been a fight and I admire that. And that’s why I wanted to make a film about her.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: That’s also something her mother says, which was really touching as well. You’ve struggled all your life and now I want your happiness. It’s something like that. And it was so touching to hear that at the end.

Alexander Murphy: Another thing was when you see Amuna and Jamuna, the two sisters, who’ve lived all their lives together. They were stuck together all their lives, they were sent together to Kathmandu, they were by themselves in Kathmandu and then it’s just that realization where this is the moment where we’re going to have to say goodbye and split. And that’s just heartbreaking.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: It feels almost like they can’t separate, almost like they were Siamese twins. And what I found really interesting in the film, even though there’s a few siblings there and family all there, we don’t see them ever, not even fighting, but even having little arguments. Do you find that that’s the way they were as a family? Somehow synchronized and flowing together. was very rarely ever tension in the film.

Alexander Murphy: Yes. This film, you know, it’s very special for the family and the girls because this film crystallized one moment where they’re going to be together, reunited forever. This moment was extremely rare, to have all the girls together in the same place, like in my cut. That never really happened. Maybe it happened when they were young, but that was the first time in years.

Jamuna hadn’t seen her parents in two or three years and this was a five week shoot. And during these five weeks, because she knew she was going to leave, she squeezed it like a lemon. She wanted to spend as much time with her family, with her sisters. And there’s no place for arguments or anything, because this was the last goodbye. At that stage you don’t argue over little things.

And they’re so respectful towards their parents, it’s crazy. They had the parents send them when they were seven years of age to this city, not knowing really where they were going to go. If that happened to me, I’d be like… What were you thinking? And they understood.

Not answering that question, but another moment where I knew I was going in the right direction. It’s when at the end of the shoot, we’re coming back down from Pupal. And in my mind, I was going 100 miles an hour, asking myself have I got the film? Have I got the topics? Have I got the shots? Have I got all of that? And was sitting down, there’s a little river, and Amuna came over to me and she said, Alex, I just wanted to thank you because thanks to you, I was able to talk about certain things that I was never able to talk to my parents about. That’s when I realised, I don’t know if I have a good film, but I know I’ve gone in the right direction. That was very powerful.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: I can vouch as a viewer that the message is transported. You mentioned perhaps a little difficult subject, which is of course, immigration and anti-immigration. And I was wondering how you see your film in that light. What does it say to Europeans and new people coming to Europe? Where do you think the place of this film is for European viewers? Or its importance for us?

Alexander Murphy:  I’m quite humble with this. I just wanted to show what it was like to leave your own country when it’s not necessarily a choice. It’s because you haven’t got any other options. Jamuna didn’t have any opportunities. She was suffocating in that city in in Kathmandu. And she’s been working all her life trying to figure out how she can manage. And her only option was to leave. It’s just an insight, an intimate look into what happens before. And it helps you understand that all the sacrifice that the people who are immigrating make. And it’s not something easy, and it’s not necessarily a choice, always.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: I felt in this movie, this emotion you spoke of, purified. Especially touching was the part where she counts how old her parents are going to be, which I think anyone who grows up and moves away can sympathize with. You are often too busy to spend with your family, but then when you think about time passing, it goes so fast. It just made me a little sad.

Alexander Murphy:  Absolutely, that’s family. You go through different emotions and you need to understand it. When she counts sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three and she goes up to seventy, that’s kind of a death sentence in a way. Because up there in the mountains, you don’t live that long and she realizes that. At that moment, they were all together, but it was probably the last time as well. And when she has that crisis at the very end, and she starts crying and you just remember this is real. It’s a documentary. 

Even the way we shot it, it’s a strange moment because how do you shoot this? Do you stay away from it? Do you get closer to them? And I think we found a really elegant way to show it while keeping a certain distance. They had their moment and we were still were able to capture the emotion and the essence of that scene.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: Let’s move away a little bit from the film and let me ask you a little bit about you and your influences as a director. You are a French-Irish, I read. And your previous films were set in South Africa, Nepal and Madagascar. What draws you to these distant places? 

Alexander Murphy:  Since a very young age, I’m not going to lie to you now, I hated school. And when I was in school, I was always thinking in four years, I’m going to be on the other side of the world. I’m going to make an effort in three years. I’m going to be the other side of the world. I’m going to be making a trip into. So that was my thing from the very start, because I knew form the age of 14, 15 that I wanted to make films and that I wanted to travel.

So what draws me is just the fact that I love having different lives and having small chapters in my life and then suddenly I’m part of that environment, I’m part of that culture and I’m so lucky to be able then to make films. What usually happens is that I get attracted to an environment and then I fall in love with a character and the story. And then it’s like, okay, let’s make a story and I’m just so lucky to be able to make stories about these people.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: I can sympathize with that because as a tourist I always feel like, what would it be like to live here for a while and take on this new personality or meet that person like a shop seller or I don’t know this guy serving you coffee and stuff like just living in this small little world for a while.

Alexander Murphy:  Absolutely, but when you’re making a film, you’re not a tourist anymore you’re a part of it all. And that’s what’s wonderful. I like going out of town, but I don’t really enjoy going on holidays. I rather shoot or do something because when you do shoot, you have an immediate, intimate look into the culture.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: Have you read Susan Sontag’s On Photography? Because she talks specifically about how when we visit other places, we often use the camera as either protection or giving us something to do because we feel like we can’t either relax or enjoy…

Alexander Murphy: Oh, I’ll have a look.

But you know what, that’s how I was able to do my films on my travels at the beginning. What protected me and my access was my camera. I started making a series of photographs and that was my way in. My next film, it’s called Born Free, is set in South Africa. It’s about the impact of photography in the townships of South Africa. And it’s about this young photographer who is in search of a missing sibling and the camera is a tool for him to unreal the truth. It’s such a powerful tool, the camera, much more than just taking the image itself, it’s just a way in, you know, and the starting point of a conversation and it’s just interesting.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: It’s interesting how the camera can also be intrusive. Almost like a weapon. You enter people’s lives, even thoughts sometimes and it gives you protection. It excludes you. It has a double identity, the camera?

Alexander Murphy: Yes, absolutely. And at the same time, people that no one had seen, no one had a real interest in see this guy with a camera and he has an interest. It’s also a way to open up and to start conversations. And that’s really interesting.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: To finish up, what impact, if any, do you hope for your movies, or Goodbye Sisters in particular, to achieve? Why do you make movies?

Alexander Murphy: Well, for this specific one, I hope the audience will have a connection with jamuna’s story, first and foremost. You did, and I’m really glad you did, because I think it’s a very universal subject. And also, for this film, I wanted to take the audience on an adventure with me, you know? It’s an intimate story, but it’s also a sensorial experience. I wanted to take the audience with me up high up in the altitude with me. I wanted them to feel the lack of oxygen. And for that, there was a lot of back and forth with the editing and the sound editing to be able to get that sensorial aspect.

And that’s why that’s why you should go and watch it in the cinema, really, because you’re missing a part of the film if you’re watching it in a small screen in your on your computer. It’s just the sound once you’re up in the cinema. It’s a different, completely different experience. And that’s why I wanted to bring it out in cinema, really, for that experience.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: Tonight is your premiere and I wish you all the best and I wish the film all the success. I’m rooting for it.

Alexander Murphy:  Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, I’m really glad. This is for me quite new, people connecting to my film and responding to it. It’s just a weird feeling because this is my first feature film. So it’s exciting, but it’s quite stressful at the same time.