This short documentary for the World Economic Forum follows the journey to bring power to an extremely remote Himalayan village. Previously light was only available after dark using kerosene lanterns, which is extremely harmful to the health of the villagers. The solar micro grids installed are a state of the art technology that allow power to be stored and shared between houses and even villages.

Getting to this remote village required flying first to Delhi, where the gear was organized and prepared. As there would be no power for several days while in and around the village the gear had to include large power banks for powering our computers for offloading footage, and enough cards and batteries to make it multiple days with two C300mkii cameras. We then flew to Leh, in the foothills of the Himalayas. From there it was two days of driving on paved roads, two more days on aggressively steep mountain roads, as we went from 3500m/12,000ft to nearly 5500m/18,000ft. At some point even that road ended and we switched our gear to donkeys for the remaining two days of trekking. We filmed for two days in this lovely high altitude village, often forgetting to move slowly and suffering minor altitude poisoning. We slept in a barn/moonshine distillery in sleeping bags. It was a hell of an adventure:) Once done we had to do the reverse journey for another week before we could get home to our beds.

Client: World Economic Forum

Project Type: Short Documentary

Director: Colm Quinn

DoP: Ben Mcintire

Camera: Ben McIntire