Nothing matches being with Alexander the Great on foot in the Hindu Kush

AT OUR LITTLE FILM COMPANY, MAYA VISION, we recently took the decision to digitise all of the rushes of our key films so that we could dispose of hundreds of boxes of tapes that had been kept in storage, throwing out stuff we thought we would never need again.

- FEMKE DE JONG

There were even cans of 16mm film that we can't even play anymore, having given our Steenbeck flatbed editing suite to a film school years ago. We've been making films for 40 years so, unsurprisingly, looking through all of that material over the past few weeks, the office became a kind of memory room.

I have always been a great believer in filming on location: where things actually happened in history really matters. Nothing quite matches being with Alexander the Great on foot in the Hindu Kush - hot, sweet black tea and coarse, bitter bread in the early morning light, shared with Northern Alliance gunmen. Or visiting Tsaparang in Tibet, frozen in time at the moment of the sack of 1693, the dead still lying in tattered clothes in their caves. Or watching dawn break over the festival of Qoyllur Rit'i at 5,000 metres in the Peruvian Andes, long congas of dancers snaking down from the night rituals at the glacier.