Home Is Not a Place: A Young Woman Traces Her Community’s History of Bride Kidnapping

By Lhakpa Choedon Lama*

June 28, 2025

“Home Is Not a Place” is a documentary that began as a personal search. When Nepal-based Lhakpa Choedon, an art director and interdisciplinary creative, discovered that her grandmother had been kidnapped and forced into marriage, she began asking questions about her family’s past, about the women around her and about a tradition many would prefer to forget.

Bride kidnapping, locally known by different names across Nepal and other parts of Central and South Asia, was once a socially tolerated practice in some communities. It involved a man abducting the woman he wanted to marry, often with the knowledge or complicity of his family or village. The woman, regardless of her consent, was expected to accept the marriage.

While often portrayed as “tradition” or even “romance,” the practice has left deep scars on generations of women, many of whom were denied a say in one of the most important decisions of their lives.

In this film, Lhakpa, who is from Nar, Manang, brings together the voices of three women from her own family, spanning three generations. Their stories are about how they responded.

One was taken away as a young girl and lived a life shaped by silence. Another rebelled quietly. And one, caught between modernity and tradition, tried to chart a different course. Through them, the film examines not only the practice itself but the power structures that upheld it – and the ways women survived, adapted and resisted.

Although bride kidnapping in its overt form may no longer be widely practiced in Nepal, the film hints at how its legacies remain – in the social expectations placed on women, in family negotiations over marriage and in how consent is understood or dismissed.

“Home Is Not a Place” is a quiet, unflinching look at how personal histories are shaped by larger social forces, and how telling these stories can begin to shift what is remembered, what is accepted, and what is possible.

As Lhakpa says, “These stories threaten to break your heart. But it’s important to tell them.”

*(Lhakpa Choedon Lama is an art director and interdisciplinary creative from Nar, Manang. With a background in interior architecture, she works with film and photography as accessible mediums to explore identity, memory and cultural change. Her practice blends research and visual storytelling to bring nuance to overlooked narratives, especially within Himalayan and Tibetan communities. Drawn to the intersection of lived experience and visual language, she is also interested in exploring visual anthropology as a way to deepen her work and invite reflection and conversation.)