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A director shot her Oscar-entry film alone, with one camera, using her own villagers as the cast
▲ 1 r/AssameseHub

A director shot her Oscar-entry film alone, with one camera, using her own villagers as the cast

Rima Das made Village Rockstars (2017) almost entirely by herself — writing, shooting, editing, and co-producing it on a Canon 5D she bought by selling gold jewelry. The cast was sourced from her own village, Kalardiya, near Chayagaon, and most had never acted before.

The film went on to win Best Feature Film at the National Film Awards, played over 70 festivals worldwide (Toronto, San Sebastián, Busan, IFFI Goa among them), and became India's official Oscar submission — only the second Assamese film ever to win the National Award, after Jahnu Barua's Halodhia Choraye Baodhan Khai nearly 30 years earlier. Do you think, we have any other such directors in Asaam?

https://preview.redd.it/hbn8jf2ibjdh1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=87f832407042da1362b19e80695c1072c44f3af8

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u/TalkiesDB — 10 days ago
▲ 4 r/u_TalkiesDB+1 crossposts

The oldest surviving Assamese film was shot in a bamboo studio because no film industry existed yet — then it was lost for decades and rediscovered in someone's garage

In 1935, a man named Jyotiprasad Agarwala wanted to make Assam's first film. There was no film industry there to work with — no studio, no crew, nothing. So he built his own studio out of bamboo mats and banana stumps on his family's tea estate, and basically did every job himself: writer, director, editor, composer, set designer, the works, because there was genuinely nobody else trained to do it.

The film, Joymoti, told the story of a 17th-century Ahom princess tortured for refusing to betray her husband's hiding place — one of the first Indian films built around a politically assertive woman as the actual center of the story, not a supporting character.

It flopped commercially and mostly disappeared for decades. Then in the early 1970s, Agarwala's brother was cleaning out his garage and found seven surviving reels sitting there. A more complete print later turned up in a studio in Lahore, having apparently traveled there before Partition, and got tracked down and recovered in Bombay in the 1990s.

It's a genuinely wild production and preservation story, and We wrote it up in more detail here (including what happened to the film's lead actress, which is its own complicated chapter):

https://talkiesdb.com/stories/he-built-a-studio-out-of-bamboo-and-banana-stumps-to-make-this-film

u/TalkiesDB — 11 days ago
▲ 4 r/IndianCinema

The oldest surviving Assamese film was shot in a bamboo studio because no film industry existed yet — then it was lost for decades and rediscovered in someone's garage

In 1935, a man named Jyotiprasad Agarwala wanted to make Assam's first film. There was no film industry there to work with — no studio, no crew, nothing. So he built his own studio out of bamboo mats and banana stumps on his family's tea estate, and basically did every job himself: writer, director, editor, composer, set designer, the works, because there was genuinely nobody else trained to do it.

The film, Joymoti, told the story of a 17th-century Ahom princess tortured for refusing to betray her husband's hiding place — one of the first Indian films built around a politically assertive woman as the actual center of the story, not a supporting character.

It flopped commercially and mostly disappeared for decades. Then in the early 1970s, Agarwala's brother was cleaning out his garage and found seven surviving reels sitting there. A more complete print later turned up in a studio in Lahore, having apparently traveled there before Partition, and got tracked down and recovered in Bombay in the 1990s.

It's a genuinely wild production and preservation story, and We wrote it up in more detail here (including what happened to the film's lead actress, which is its own complicated chapter):

https://talkiesdb.com/stories/he-built-a-studio-out-of-bamboo-and-banana-stumps-to-make-this-film

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u/TalkiesDB — 11 days ago