Sultana’s Dream is a vignette anthology of feminist utopia and stories from the partition.
Story so far: Spitting Image, a Bengaluru-based design and animation studio, have directed and animated a short film called Sultana’s dream. The film is an adaptation of a 1905 feminist utopian novella written by Rokeya Sahkawat Hossain. Sultana’s Dream, the movie, premiered at Lost Migrations, a film festival held at Bangalore International Centre on February 18.
- The film is about Sultana, a lady who drifts into a feminist utopian land where there is no patriarchy and men are restrained by the purdah tradition. Accompanying it are four semi-fictionalised vignettes of crimes perpetrated against women during the Partition.
- Pakistan-based Saadia Gardezi and UK-based Sam Dalrymple collated their findings on the partition’s impact on migrants and the middle class. Gardezi wrote a script that incorporated the experiences of women from social backgrounds.
Why it matters? People from the UK, Pakistan, and India created all the films that premiered at the film festival. Sultana’s Dream aimed to initiate conversations about the Partition using the animation format and including diverse voices in its script. The creators decided to display the faces of the perpetrators instead of focusing on the gory violence.
(Image credits: Spitting Image’s website)