Rima Das is an Indian film-maker from Assam. Entirely self-taught, she wrote, directed, photographed, edited and produced Village Rockstars (2017) with a small digital camera and a cast of children from her own village. It won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film and was India’s entry for the Academy Awards. She is one of the most admired independent film-makers in the country.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Rima Das |
| Born | Kalardiya, near Chhaygaon, Kamrup district, Assam |
| State | Assam |
| Occupation | Film director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, producer |
| Education | Cotton College, Guwahati; master’s degree in sociology |
| Notable films | Man with the Binoculars, Village Rockstars, Bulbul Can Sing, Tora’s Husband, Village Rockstars 2 |
| Awards | National Film Award for Best Feature Film (2018); National Film Award for Best Editing (2018) |
Early Life
She was born and brought up in Kalardiya, a village near the town of Chhaygaon, about fifty kilometres from Guwahati, on land that the Brahmaputra floods almost every year. Her father was a teacher. She acted in school plays and wanted to be an actress.
She studied at Cotton College in Guwahati and took a master’s degree in sociology.
Mumbai
In 2003 she went to Mumbai to try for a career in acting. She played in theatre, including an adaptation of Premchand’s Godaan, but found little work in films; her looks and accent, she was told, did not fit. During these years she watched the classics of world cinema, the films of Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman and Majid Majidi among them, and began to think of making films herself.
She bought a digital camera, taught herself to use it and to edit, and made short films.
Career
First feature
Her first full-length film, Antardrishti, or Man with the Binoculars (2016), about a retired teacher in a village, was shown at festivals at Tallinn and Mumbai.
Village Rockstars
While shooting it in her home village she noticed a group of boys playing with instruments cut out of foam, pretending to be a rock band. She began filming the village children, without a script, a crew or professional actors, over about four years, using available light and working around the monsoon and the school terms.
The film follows Dhunu, a ten-year-old girl, played by Das’s young cousin Bhanita Das, who longs for a real guitar and whose widowed mother backs her against the disapproval of the village. Das did almost every job herself.
Village Rockstars opened at the Toronto festival in 2017 and was shown at more than seventy festivals. At the National Film Awards of 2018 it won Best Feature Film, the first Assamese film to do so in thirty years, along with the awards for best child artist, editing and location sound. It was chosen as India’s submission for the Academy Award for foreign-language film.
Later films
- Bulbul Can Sing (2018): three teenagers in a village coming up against its moral code. It received a special mention at the Berlin festival and the National Award for best Assamese film.
- Tora’s Husband (2022): a small-town businessman during the pandemic, shown at Toronto
- Village Rockstars 2 (2024): Dhunu as a teenager. It won the main award of its section at the Busan festival and was shown at Berlin.
She has also contributed to an international anthology film and served on festival juries, including at Toronto.
Method
She still works with a very small team, often alone behind the camera, with people from her village and the surrounding area as actors, and edits at home. Her films are in Assamese and its Kamrupi dialect, and their subjects are childhood, the lives of girls and women, and the river landscape of lower Assam.
Recognition
She was named among the most influential young Indians by a magazine in 2018 and has been honoured by the Government of Assam. She divides her time between Mumbai and her village.
With the veteran Jahnu Barua she is the best-known Assamese film-maker of her time, working in a film culture whose audiences were for years sustained by the popularity of Zubeen Garg.
Featured image: Rima Das receiving the National Film Award for Village Rockstars, May 2018. Photo by the President’s Secretariat, licensed under Government Open Data License – India, via Wikimedia Commons.
