Kasia Smutniak presents Mustang at Rome Film Festival, a documentary on Taricone and a Nepal school

A trip that began in 2003

Kasia Smutniak's second documentary as a director, Mustang, was presented in competition at the 21st Rome Film Festival on 19 October 2026. The non-fiction film is assembled from personal and family video footage, and it begins with a 2003 journey to the Mustang region in northeast Nepal, which Smutniak made with Pietro Taricone, her partner at the time and the father of their daughter Sophie. According to Smutniak, the idea came from Taricone, who came home one day wanting to go there. The couple took a small video camera and promised to return and help the region's communities. They never went back together, because Taricone died in 2010 at the age of 35 after a parachuting accident. The documentary spans more than 20 years, moving between trips made in 2003, 2010 and 2025.

A school and a community

Smutniak kept that promise with Kunzom Thakuri, a woman from Mustang whom she met on one of her journeys, by building a school that lets children of the region continue their education without leaving their families. The timing is reported differently across accounts: one dates the project's launch to 2013, when it began with the Pietro Taricone Foundation, while another gives 2016 as the year the school opened. Around the school, the film follows daily life in a community that Smutniak describes as one that studies happiness. Her earlier film, Mur, which was awarded at the David di Donatello, followed people who tried to save migrants in the Belarusian forests. She said she was drawn back to that theme of hope during a difficult period for humanity.

Smutniak put the theme in a single line at the press conference:

“I wanted to introduce you to a philosophy and a real community that looks after happiness and studies it in a scientific way.”

Sophie and the camera

The camcorder Taricone used to film the couple's trips is now in the hands of their daughter Sophie, who took it to Mustang and narrates the film. Smutniak said she began working on the material in earnest in 2018, after years of filming without a fixed plan, while the region was changing with the arrival of roads, electricity and the internet. She had seen that her daughter would make the most interesting character but did not want to put that weight on her. Only when Sophie, by then grown, asked about her father's camera did the project take its shape. Sophie went to Mustang alone at 19, and the film also follows a community threatened by depopulation.

Release and what comes next

Mustang is produced by Fandango with Luce Cinecittà, with support from the Associazione Pietro Taricone and the Unione Buddhista Italiana. In a statement, Smutniak said she was happy and honoured to present the film to Italian audiences in Rome, and that it had taken seven years of work. The statement continued:

“I am happy and honoured that Mustang is being presented to Italian audiences here in Rome. Seven years of work, over twenty years of life.”

At the press conference she described the film in terms of a closing circle.

“This film, in a way, opens one door and closes another. It is a circle being completed.”

The film is scheduled for cinemas from 23 November 2026.