A Late Autumn Dream Pramati Anand

Bengali, Khasi, English

Pramati Anand

91 9953128533 | pramatianand04@gmail.com

Synopsis

Born and brought up in Shillong, Meghalaya to a post-partition family from Bangladesh, Jonaki Das, a non-tribal, is a final year anthropology student who grew up listening to her grandmother’s stories of a simpler time back in Bogra, Bangladesh.

Her final year thesis would have given her the opportunity to go to Bangladesh, the homeland that she could never reach, but Covid has rendered that unattainable. Pressured by her father, Jonaki embarks reluctantly on a government field trip to a village near the border of Assam and Meghalaya, where she befriends a young tribal girl, Banteim.

A trip to the river spells doom for the girls when Banteim suffers from a near-fatal accident and they get stranded on the other side of the root bridge. Dreams and reality converge as Jonaki realizes she had a premonition about the incident earlier that day.

Lost in the jungles of Meghalaya, Jonaki must listen to Banteim’s ancestral knowledge to decode the dream motifs before Banteim falls prey to the demonic spirit of a mythical creature while a conflict at the Assam and Meghalaya borders gets out of hand.

Writer’s Statement

In 2020, when I was documenting the Living Root Bridges of Meghalaya for a UNESCO project along with a teammate, we went for a swim in the forest when she suffered from a hypothermia attack.

As she slipped into a coma in my arms, I was sure the end was near. It was only later that we realized that I had a dream about the incident which we had discussed before embarking on the journey and it completely shifted my logical perspective of reality. It is since then that I have been unraveling the threads of this story.

My personal journey as a storyteller has been deeply involved with a certain sense of ethnographic research about communities and their relationship with nature. Deeply rooted in the land, the film derives its structure from the local folklore and oral histories.

Biography

A post-graduate in Film and Video Communication from NID, Ahmedabad, Pramati’s creative journey revolves around exploring stories, people and places through travel and cinema. Walking on the precipice between fiction and non-fiction, she hopes to create narratives that lie somewhere on the bridge between them.

She has been a part of the Looking China Youth Film Project in 2018 and 2020, where she made two documentaries; In Search Of Fireflies/2018 and Letters to Tian Tian/2020. She was also a participant at the documentary masterclass - Interdoc 2019 held in Pozega, Serbia. Her graduation film An Early Spring, a short fiction based in Himachal Pradesh was the official selection at IFFI 2021, among other national and international film festivals. She is currently developing her debut fiction feature film, A Late Autumn Dream.