By Naman Ramachandran

When Nepali filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar and actor Asha Magrati were gearing up to shoot for their upcoming film “Pooja, Sir” in 2022, life threw them an unexpected twist.

What began as a disturbing swelling in the throat of Magrati, Rauniyar's wife and frequent collaborator, during a trip to New York, quickly escalated into a series of cancer diagnoses that threatened not only the film but Magrati's life.

“We were still visiting Frontieres,” Rauniyar recalls, referring to the Montreal film market where they were promoting another project. But when they returned to North Carolina, where Rauniyar was teaching at the time, the couple found themselves in a race against time to secure medical care.