Rima Das continues her solitary pursuit with Village Rockstars sequel

A scene from Village Rockstars 2.

Thiruvananthapuram

Back in 2017, Rima Das burst into the film festival circuit as the one-person crew behind the acclaimed Assamese film Village Rockstars. The credits roll had mostly her name scrolling up one after the other, as she had written the story and screenplay, and handled direction, cinematography, editing and production design. Embodying the ‘indie spirit,’ it turned out to be a joyous celebration of carefree childhood. The film was also India’s official entry for the 90th Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

Seven years later, when Ms. Das returns with the sequel Village Rockstars 2, not much has changed in her approach, she says, despite the access to funds and support that came with the acclaim that her films won.

Same approach

“When I began making the sequel, somehow I was determined to maintain the purity of the first part. This took me almost four years to complete. The approach has been more or less the same, except that I have a better camera and have become more careful about the sound. This time, I also explored more in shooting in natural light as I have gained a better understanding of light over the past few years. In its production size and emotional range, the film is certainly bigger than the first one,” she says in an interview with The Hindu, a day ahead of the screening of Village Rockstars 2 in the Kaleidoscope section at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK).

The first part had Dhunu (played by Rima’s niece Bhanita Das) as a girl who dreams of having a guitar of her own and starting a band with her friends. “Whenever I watched on the big screen the end part of her achieving that dream by playing a guitar for the first time, I felt that the story should be continued. It was a big risk because the first part was so popular and remains my most successful film. I just gave it my best,” she says.

Filmmaker Rima Das

Changed lives

Just like how Richard Linklater returns to the same set of characters after a few years, to explore how their lives have changed in the intervening period, Ms. Das looks at the changing aspirations and mindset of Dhunu and her band of friends.

“Bhanita has great capacity as an actor. I have seen her growing stronger in these years. As a person too, she does things in a very unconventional way, but it looks very natural. I always love shooting her visuals. But, initially the shooting process was not smooth. When they were all children, it was much easier as there was no mobile or Internet in the village and they were quite focussed that time. For them also, this was something new. These things had changed this time and I also had to handle their moods. But despite all that they had not lost their purity and things soon fell into place,” says Ms. Das.

Two together

In July 2020, she started simultaneously working on Village Rockstars 2 and Tora’s Husband, both set in her hometown of Chaygaon. Centred on a small business owner’s family life that unravels during the pandemic, Tora’s Husband was completed in 2022. The locations of the films are hardly 2 km apart, she says, but they look like completely different worlds, one semi-urban and the other a pristine village.

When she began shooting Village Rockstars 2, she had a bigger crew, but later on decided to work in solitude. “After about three months of working with a crew, I realised that I needed solitude to work on this film. I had to wait and have the patience to get the right visuals and light. Although the story is about how teenagers navigate their dreams in a challenging economic background, it is also about Assam’s nature and land, as well as the relationship of the mother and daughter. I see this film as a tribute to my people and land,” she says.