It is a coming-of-age tale where youth grapple with their first profound loss. Filmmaker Yi-Shan’s best friends Chun and Yueh were trapped in a Nepal cave for 47 days. Chun died three days before Yueh's rescue, prompting Yi-Shan to take up the camera and retrace her friends’ footsteps in Nepal. When Yi-Shan reaches the cave, what awaits her there?

In February 2017, two young Taiwanese, Chen-chun and Sheng-yueh, went missing while trekking to the Ganesh Himal peak in the Himalayan mountain range. Nearly two months later, a search team found them in a cave, but one had already died. Director Lo Yi-Shan, their close friend, may have been destined with them according to the original plan. The director could not join her two friends and had to return home due to her poor health. She embraces the tragedy as her own. Director Lo made this documentary to fulfill the promise made by her friends, Chen-chun and Sheng-yueh, to share their story with others. However, the film is more than a record that follows in their footsteps; it is also a window of the director's emotions. In the latter part of the movie, scenes alternate between the director retracing the route the two have passed and the footage captured by the search team at the time of the accident. The desperation felt by the director and the people involved becomes strangely mixed. Ultimately, After the Snowmelt is a film about personal growth that encloses the director's determination to accept the past and move forward to a new horizon, alongside a tribute to Chen-chun, who died in an accident. That may be why the first and last scenes are composed of the director walking through the lonely snow-covered path. (MOON Seok)