At Rotterdam 2025, 2 Indian Films Explore Life’s Transitions

Rotterdam 2025 Diaries: Stories Of Gender, Identity & Crisis

OTTplay critic Aditya Shrikrishna offers a ringside view of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, bringing firsthand insights and in-depth coverage. Here are his first two dispatches from the festival.

AT THIS YEAR'S International Film Festival Rotterdam, Indian cinema is in a deeply introspective mood, unspooling stories of memory, displacement, and existential unease. Lipika Singh Darai’s B and S extends her epistolary film essays, crafting an intimate meditation on gender, longing, and quiet defiance. Suman Mukhopadhyay’s The Puppet’s Tale adapts Putulnacher Itikatha into a brooding, spectral portrait of a man — and a country — on the cusp of transformation. Both films, in their own ways, dissolve the boundaries between the personal and the political, lingering in the mind like half-remembered dreams.

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In Lipika Singh Darai’s Cinema, Filmmaking Becomes an Epistolary Exercise

FILMMAKER LIPIKA SINGH DARAI heard about her grand-aunt’s passing just as she took an export of her film in 2013. Her film Dragonfly and Snake (2014) kickstarted a series of letters to her grand-aunt not as a record of their relationship but as works documenting imaginary conversations on Darai’s own ruminations in a world without the constant figure of her childhood. As a child, she spent her summers with her grand aunt in her village. It was also around the time when Darai, a Film and Television Institute of India graduate and multiple National Award winner, left Mumbai and moved permanently to her home in Odisha to make films in the state. The series of imaginary letters is now a series of mid-length film essays — Dragonfly and Snake , Night and Fear (2023), and B and S (2025). B and S had its world premiere at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam this year.

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The Puppet's Tale Captures The Anxiety Of A Man — & A Country — On The Edge

SUMAN MUKHOPADHYAY 's Putulnacher Itikatha or The Puppet’s Tale (part of the Big Screen Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam this week) begins with a man on a boat, the twilight glistening in the swampy conditions surrounded by rural Bengal of the late 1930s. On the boat is Dr Shashi Bhuto (Abir Chatterjee), encountering his ancestral village and with it, death. “Everyone must face death someday”, his voiceover drones, insisting that he doesn’t, therefore, mourn. He lives a double life, one in his physical manifestation, as a doctor in a village in pre-Independence India, populated by people with little to no education and beset by all kinds of issues, from religious dogma, superstitions and lack of access to basic services amidst war in Europe and freedom struggle. His other life is in his head, his future he dreams of in a city, maybe London, as the affluent, posh doctor he wishes to be.

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