Nepalese director Saurav Ghimire’s essay film-cum-travelogue can also be viewed as a song, one with multiple voices and lyrical refrains that question the nature and the impossibilities of love. The 17-minute docu-ficton examines the disappearance of Prem, a radio show host specialised in relationship advice. Shot in grainy black-and-white with an intimate and often unstable camera, Ghimire records Prem’s journey to the sublime Kathmandu landscapes of towering cliffs, leafy enclaves, and isolated homes. Despite the first-person perspective of these textured images, seen by Prem, his voice-over is joined by those of three guests who dial in to the radio show seeking his advice. All of their stories find themselves at a crossroads with the socio-political structures of Nepali society.

Ghimire turns the sensorial links you’d expect between image, text, and sound on their head to a poetic effect. Against the backdrop of panoramic alpine landscapes, testimonies of oppressive confinement are presented. One caller confesses her relationship is forbidden, as her partner stems from a different caste. Another is trapped in the closet, unable to reveal his true sexuality, due to his arranged marriage and its legal implications. Without a radio host, the testimonies unfold akin to epistolary fragments: more interested in raising questions than finding concrete answers to these complicated and shadowy matters of the heart—the audio wavers in and out.

The precarity of the radio signal further amplifies the political urgency of Ghimire’s work. It testifies to the radical desire for agency and to be heard. In this juxtaposition of sound and image, Songs of Love and Hate engages in modes of ethical, visual refusal, omitting the faces of those speaking. This anonymity protects the speakers while also underlining the collectivity of its signals—each voice speaks for a generation of young Nepalis.

Borrowing its title from Leonard Cohen’s seminal album, the film reflects upon the extreme dichotomies of heartbreak and love, with dialogue unfolding like a lyrical refrain. Prem repeats: “What use is a heart full of love if you aren’t close?” An ultimately unanswerable question about yearning. Shaky images accompany the sound of Prem panting up a hill, indicative of a journey of change full of bumps and instabilities. The camera can’t help but look up at the dark sky. In the establishing shot, a moon illuminates the black screen, viewed clunkily from the back of a vehicle. Again, a slow zoom narrows in on the planet as Prem reckons with the finality of his previous relationship.

Cohen’s song “Sing Another Song Boys” ends with:  “Ah, they’ll never, they’ll never ever reach the moon, at least not the one that we’re after.” In Ghimire’s revisioning, the lyrics take on a political implication—an itinerant radio signal that cannot be captured. Even as all these external forces attempt to restrict and clamp down on the speakers’ wayward forms of desire, our ability to hear their confessions echoes Cohen’s words: their moon is one that others will “never ever reach”.