Kathmandu, April 2 -- There is something quietly radical about a Nepali web series that refuses to glamorise the immigrant dream. 'Mankala', the debut web series from New Envision Production, written and directed by Om Raj Raut, does not ask you to admire its protagonist from a distance. It places you right inside her cramped New York apartment, inside the endless loop of her mother's phone calls, inside the particular exhaustion of a woman trying to figure out who she is while everyone around her has already decided who she should be.

The series follows Mankala, played by Aayusha Sanjel Chhetri, a thirty-year old Nepali woman navigating life in New York while her mother back home wages a relentless campaign to get her married. The core ...