In Lipika Singh Darai’s Cinema, Filmmaking Becomes an Epistolary Exercise

FILMMAKER LIPIKA SINGH DARAI heard about her grand-aunt’s passing just as she took an export of her film in 2013. Her film Dragonfly and Snake (2014) kickstarted a series of letters to her grand-aunt not as a record of their relationship but as works documenting imaginary conversations on Darai’s own ruminations in a world without the constant figure of her childhood. As a child, she spent her summers with her grand aunt in her village. It was also around the time when Darai, a Film and Television Institute of India graduate and multiple National Award winner, left Mumbai and moved permanently to her home in Odisha to make films in the state. The series of imaginary letters is now a series of mid-length film essays—Dragonfly and Snake, Night and Fear (2023), and B and S (2025). B and S had its world premiere at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam this year.

According to Darai, the films didn’t exactly begin as letters but when she was making the first film, they imparted a feeling of sitting down and writing to her grand-aunt on paper. The experience felt like there were always two folds of an image. She never officially expressed that these films were letters, it was only in her mind. But for her, they remain as essays in the form of images and sounds. Dragonfly and Snake began as footage shot for something else, “pickled a bit,” as she puts it, and transformed into one-way conversations with her grand-aunt. “How would people look at this?”, Darai had wondered. “The process was personal and less manipulative. People feel I must have been particular about images, but they came effortlessly and organically”. She didn’t think long and hard about what shots to put into her essay.

In Dragonfly and Snake, the images consist of the Darai’s frames in Mumbai co-existing with small town Odisha, the scenes depicting both distance and longing. Her voiceover, sometimes depicting what the image is saying and sometimes just her thoughts to her grand-aunt, blends seamlessly into the anti-narrative. Night and Fear (2023) was triggered by a photograph in the newspaper, a woman branded as a witch, stripped, beaten and tied, lying on the floor. It is Darai questioning the world around her, the epistolary exercise excavating meaning in an increasingly irrational world. For example, the new film B and S focuses on the eponymous individuals — Darai’s friends — both trans women who develop a tender friendship coloured by trust and intimacy. This too is designed as a conversation with her grand-aunt, a way of delving into topics Darai would have loved to discuss if she had been alive. “My grand-aunt left the family she married into and started living with her brother”, Darai said. “She was alone most of her life and nobody asked her about her desires, sexual or otherwise. When I witnessed B and S, I wanted to broach these topics with her”.

The latest film glides over images of B and S’s shared home, their presence in those interior worlds as well as the exterior filmed with a loving, quiet, celebratory lens. It documents how the two friends—two individuals who identify as women—negotiate public and private spaces and their natural but rare intimacy in friendship in a world that seems to aggressively reject them. Darai was drawn to this because of her own experience with a close friend in the past. B left Bhubaneswar because the city didn’t offer her anything and just like how Darai’s friend had helped her settle in a new place years ago, she did for B. And then got the chance to witness B build this bond with S. “It reminded me of that kind of trust. It’s not there anymore. The trust that we can build our entire world together. Something that exists only within cis het marital structure”. It is the kind of intimacy that is rare in friendship and Darai found that beautiful.

Lipika Singh Darai’s films tend to use superimposition and split screen to expose a world within worlds and the forever transitory phases of life itself. The form lends itself to her essay films where time and space jump around, the liminal realities communicated to her grand aunt as streams of consciousness. Darai says that she even looks at her own reality this way. “When I look at things, I see many images. I am sitting here, looking at the wall, but I see three images already, there is a mirror, the door and I perceive them differently. I am at peace when there are many images at one time, they offer that creative stimulation.”