Kathmandu, June 15 -- A middle-aged woman draped in white sari screams in agony as she runs towards the village. "They burnt her alive. She screamed in pain, but they watched her burn alive," she cries. The women in the village hold their children close to them as they stretch their necks to watch: a woman burned alive in her dead husband's funeral pyre, a Sati ritual being performed.

As the scene continues, with the piercing screams and cries of women and children filling the auditorium at Shilpee Theatre, the audience watches with an aching silence until the stage turns dark.

Director Tanka Chaulagain's Yogmaya quickly sets the theme of social injustices, especially the state of women in Nepal during the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentiet...