Village Rockstars 2

Kim Jiseok Award, 2024 Busan International Film Festival
Official Selection, 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

Seven years after we first met her, Dhunu is no longer a kid and she knows it. “I want to be small again,” she tells a friend. While she can roam the fields and climb familiar trees, she knows that growing up is around the corner, an adulthood she sees in her mother, herself older, and the other women of the village who tend the crops. There is no promise that what worked for a previous generation will work for hers. Corporations are creeping in from beyond the horizon. And her teacher reminds the class that increasing floods are the village’s top concern.

Yet, some things remain. Dhunu still harbors music dreams. The breeze still makes her smile. As external and internal worlds shift, director Rima Das lingers on these golden hour moments, and the window they open to the enduring lives of Assamese women: the tenderness between mother and daughter, the camaraderie between women in the fields, the friendships of girls approaching womanhood. There are rituals and ceremonies, goats and river leeches. All while Dhunu quietly imagines a life ahead. She once carved guitars out of styrofoam. Now, she will carve a future of her own. Like Das’ brilliant snapshot of her beloved Assam village, it will surely be luminous.

–Brian Hu