Goodbye Sisters (2025) ‘Tallinn’ Movie Review: Arresting Doc Tracks a Journey of Release through Remote Nepal

In Alexander Murphy’s documentary “Goodbye Sisters,” we encounter a form of persistence that cuts through the hardest rock. In Kathmandu, the 21-year-old Jamuna and her younger sister Anmuna realise they must take a long trip back home to their remote mountainous village. They hope to harvest yarsagumba, the only option that can bring them quick, substantial money.

There’s gentleness in the film, despite the punishing circumstances the girls weather. “Goodbye Sisters” shares their resilience without hectoring emphasis. We can gauge how they’ve strode through life’s vagaries, never allowing themselves to get beaten. Once Jamuna and Anmuna arrive in their ancestral village, the film opens up. There’s a wider web that relegates opportunity to only a few women, while others bear the brunt of normative marriage and tradition.

For the two to break away into independent lives, the family has had to survive immense mental strain. Intimate conversations among sisters and between generations reveal deep fault lines. There’s been sacrifice, self-negation for others in the family to rise and go forth. In a wrenching moment, the mother confesses to being anxious over repaying the loan taken for her daughter’s ambition.

Worry is at a criss-cross between loan trouble and whether the girls would be safe and doing well wherever they are. To dispatch their children for a life elsewhere in the city is to brace oneself for steep risk. Emancipation is spiked with the possibility of danger. There are heartbreaking discoveries that hint that Jamuna and Anmuna had been exploited and abused by people who promised their parents safe access to a bright future.

Goodbye Sisters (2025) — A still from “Goodbye Sisters” (2025)

“Goodbye Sisters” emerges as a sobering portrait of inter-generational womanhood struggling to define itself. The advantages and opportunities one might not get in one’s time could be tapped by those next in line. These differences dart among the sisters themselves. But none allow themselves to be consumed in rancour, bitterness, and envy.

There’s no grumbling over why one got buoyed by their parents and the other foisted into marriage. That might have flared earlier, but now there’s reassurance and solidarity each sister finds in one another. Support and encouragement are instrumental for them to seize hope in despair. Murphy unobtrusively lets us sit alongside the women. One laments a domineering, controlling husband. Jamuna insists they could still chase education. Marriage hasn’t shut it all out.

Jamuna and Anmuna are confident and tenacious, traversing unfamiliar terrain with unerring strength. They have mettle in hacking through the worst odds, charged with resolve to make the most of their seemingly shrinking fate. The fiercely ambitious Jamuna is seeking to leave soon for Japan and pursue higher studies. Her incipient departure foments hovering grief and pangs of abandonment.

It’s a difficult choice, nevertheless, a necessary one. Jamuna knows she cannot return for many years. She cannot afford it. It means looking at grim possibilities like her parents passing away in her absence. Yet, her decision is impelled by her keen desire to make her parents’ lives easier. Despite their age, they endure the challenging conditions of making ends meet. Jamuna doubts her decision but is aware that’s her only way out. It’s how she can break the cycle.

Quest for the caterpillar-fungus pulls the women through immense travails, climes of biting cold. This journey is known to kill many seekers lulled by desperation and impatience, and wholly unprepared for what it takes. It demands rigour, an eye for the minute, a spirit capable of withstanding protracted efforts of stumbling on nothing. The bold, vivacious women of “Goodbye Sisters” prove more than equal to the task. They are inspiring, defiant, and their magnanimity to see through whatever life hurls at them.

It’s a privilege to meet them. Murphy captures magnificent, humbling mountain vistas, whilst grounding them in compassionate quandaries. The route to uncovering the thing that can turn lives around for a while, lift above misery, is treacherous, riddled with questions of faith and brave soldiering forth. As “Goodbye Sisters” ascends to higher altitudes, it exerts a deep, abiding emotional pull. The sisters stake an immediate, inexorable pull over our hearts, reminding so much pliability can be mined in the most unyielding circumstances. Alexander Murphy has made a film that effortlessly bridges the observational and the sneakily emotional in a visually breathtaking journey.