Lost Migrations: Sultana's Dream

We worked with Project Dastaan to co-produce, direct and animate Sultana's Dream, based on a screenplay by Saadia Gardezi. This short film was an episode from an anthology called Lost Migrations, produced by Project Dastaan and funded in large part by the National Geographic Society.

The film is inspired by RS Hossain's eponymous short story, Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence and Project Dastaan's interviews with survivors of the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947. 

Project Dastaan is a collective who seek to document the stories of survivors of the India-Pakistan partition of 1947. The partition is the largest forced migration in human history - a profoundly traumatic event that has a direct impact on the geopolitics of South-East Asia even today.

Written in 1905, the original Sultana's Dream is an early science-fiction novella in which a woman wakes up in an alternate world called Ladyland, a futuristic society where gender roles are reversed. It is one of the most prominent examples of South-Asian feminist fiction from that era. In our story, Ladyland serves as a foil against which we contrast the stark realities of women who were caught in the deeply gendered violence of the partition. 

Given the nature of Saadia’s script and the way it straddled both historical narratives and elements of fantasy, we spent a lot of time considering our shot choices, framing and compositions. Our aim was to arrive at a way of telling this story that remained both sensitive and accurate as the script required. 

Since the film is set in two distinct historical periods, Sultana’s Dream also presented the very welcome challenge of making our landscapes, character designs and props appropriate to their time and cultural context.  This involved an immersive phase of research and art direction that guided us from pre-production till release. The voice acting and casting came to us via Puffball Studios in Pakistan, where the VO director Rasti Farooq coordinated her team to play the ensemble of characters that make up Sultana’s Dream. As part of this cross border exchange, we had the pleasure of casting and working with Kirtana Kumar and Maaya Narrain to record voice overs for Puffball’s film Seabirds.