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Collective Dreams Stitched into December

सामूहिक सपनोों से सिला हुआ दिसंबर

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INDIA / 2025 / Hindi, Marwari, Bengali, English / Color / DCP / 60 min

Director, Photography: Bappadittya Sarkar
Sound Mixing, Score: Rishabh Bhan Singh
Music Performance: Ravi Bhat
Producers: Garm Hava, Bappadittya Sarkar, Rishabh Bhan Singh
Source: Bappadittya Sarkar

A director and the audience exchange opinions at a small film screening. People delivering newspapers bring bustle to the early morning streets. Artisans sew blankets with powerful hands. We hear about the political achievements of Ambedkar, who worked to abolish the caste system; and then about the troubling fact that a statue of Manu—author of the “Laws of Manu” that institutionalized the caste system—has been erected in a courthouse. People protest their forced relocation for the sake of a tiger sanctuary. Tied together by mythic narratives and natural scenery as seams, the fragments combine into a fabric that portrays a December in Jaipur like a patchwork. (IST)

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[Director’s Statement] During my time working with a trade union and unorganised construction workers in Jaipur, the city began to reveal its hidden layers—spaces tucked away from the mainstream gaze, lives rendered invisible by dominant narratives of heritage and royalty. It is these spaces and people that I felt compelled to bring to the forefront, to challenge the postcard image of Jaipur as merely a city of forts and palaces.

Most official histories of Jaipur and Rajasthan neglect the people who build and sustain it. This film became a way to document what is missing—not as data, but as memory. I was drawn not only to the material realities of labour and survival but also to the emotional, imagined, and mythic landscapes people inhabit. Even within documentary, I wanted to move toward the surreal: to create a space of dreaming, a folk-oral texture of rebellion that might outlive the film itself.

While filming, I encountered a public meeting about the displacement of tribal communities in Dholpur. This moment shifted the film’s axis. It made clear that love and will cannot remain internal—they must move outward. To make change, we must step beyond our homes, into spaces of discomfort and collective struggle. Formally, I wanted to work within a hybrid documentary mode—one that listens, that resists the clarity of explanation, and that allows history, memory, and imagination to coexist. The film is an act of witnessing, but also an offering—toward a more plural way of seeing Jaipur, one shaped by resistance, labour, land, and dreams.