"My favourite stories...If only freedom kept its promises” starts the animated short film Sultana’s Dream, directed and animated by the city-based design and animation studio Spitting Image. The short film, based on a 1905 feminist utopian novella of the same name written by Rokeya Sahkawat Hossain, was premiered at Lost Migrations, a film festival that was held on February 18 at the Bangalore International Centre.
The screening, containing two other animated shorts Seabirds and Rest In Paper, is about one unifying theme that ties all the films together: the lost or forgotten stories of women during the Partition. The process of adapting a 1905 novella into a 12-minute animated short wasn’t an easy task.
“The story is essentially about this old lady Sultana who drifts into sleep while reading the book Sultana’s Dream and in her dreams, she visits the feminist utopian land where women aren’t a victim of the patriarchy. That fictionalised world then parallels with four semi-fictionalised vignettes of crimes against women from the Partition era. The biggest challenge for us was to give justice to the adaptation because we were dealing with limited time. For that, we would especially like to credit Sandhya Visvanathan who contextualised the many atrocities of that time so we could successfully narrativise the whole thing,” says Shoumik Biswas, co-founder of Spitting Image along with Visvanathan, Aditya Bharadwaj and Aniruddh Menon.
All the films in Lost Migrations are worked on by people hailing from the UK, Pakistan and India, making it a cross-sectional production. The screenplay for Sultana’s Dream, for instance, was written by Saadia Gardezi who is based out of Pakistan.
“Gardezi and Sam Dalrymple are, in a way, the historians for this project. They did the hard research on it. By the time the script came to us, they had already collated their findings into this fiction piece. Their work was reflective of the state of migrant workers and how the middle class was affected at the time. Gardezi wrote a script that entailed how women from different walks of life had experienced the Partition and we largely focussed on bringing that into visual life in a respectful and imaginative way,” shares Menon, adding that the making of the film started in 2020.
The larger goal of the project was to open up a dialogue about Partition. “The idea was not to create a descriptive or detailed version of the events that transpired but to open up a dialogue using the format of animation and showcase diverse voices,” says Bharadwaj.
Biswas adds that they took a different approach to depict the violence against women during the Partition. “We decided that we’re not going to show the violence and make the film gory. But instead, we showed the faces of the perpetrators and not hide them in the shadows, for example,” concludes Biswas.