DawnSong

The film is the journey of a father who, upon receiving information that his estranged son has been found injured and left for dead under a bridge, travels across the country to make sense of what caused this incident. As he meets doctors, policemen, nurses and strangers at the hospital, they let out and hold back stories and secrets that help him to eventually piece together the truth behind his son's political, personal, and sexual identities. At the same time, these stories and beliefs also help his comatose son on his own journey of healing and recovery.

  • Ritwik Goswami
    Director
  • Ritwik Goswami
    Writer
  • Film and Television Institute of India
    Producer
  • Vikrant Dhote
    Key Cast
    "Ananya Sanyal"
    Gully Boy
  • Arjun Radhakrishnan
    Key Cast
    "Inaayat"
    Shreelancer
  • Salmin Sheriff
    Key Cast
    "Ambar Sanyal"
    Shreelancer, Sacred Games, War
  • Anuj Ujawane
    Cinematographer
  • Joydip Das
    Editor
  • Dhvaj Bhatnagar
    Sound Recording and Sound Design
  • Dhvaj Bhatnagar
    Music
  • Mausam Aggarwal
    Production Designer
  • Project Type:
    Short, Student
  • Genres:
    Drama, LGBTQI
  • Runtime:
    24 minutes 56 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 8, 2020
  • Production Budget:
    1,600 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    India
  • Country of Filming:
    India
  • Language:
    Bengali, English, Hindi, Marathi
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.35:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes
Director Biography - Ritwik Goswami

Ritwik Goswami was born in 1991, in Calcutta, India, and grew up in six cities in different parts of the country that created within him, a lifelong desire to explore nuances in different languages and cultures and bring out anthropological intricacies and human universalities through the medium of filmmaking.

After his B.Sc. in Economics, he went on to pursue a post-graduate diploma in Direction and Screenplay Writing from the Film and Television Institute of India, in Pune, Maharashtra. While in film school, he explored filmmaking in 16mm and 35mm film as well as digital formats, in a series of music videos, experimental shorts, documentaries and fiction shorts. It was then that he also grew a keen interest in the various landscapes and populaces in Maharashtra while working on the anthropological documentaries, ‘Gunjavane’, and ‘Life of a Wave’, the latter being based on the lives of a family of fisherwomen in a Koli fishing village on the Arabian Sea.

After graduating film school in early 2020, Ritwik currently resides in Mumbai, India, where he is researching and working towards developing a documentary on protest music born out of the state of Kashmir, which has been under a government-sanctioned lockdown for over seven months. He also hopes to return to the Koli fishing village to film a narrative fiction short, ‘Swarnapuchhri’ which he had written weaving together elements from the lives of the fisherfolk in the village that he had encountered and had felt resonating with his own self.

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Director Statement

My filmmaking has been deeply inspired by stories of the outliers - social, cultural, sexual and emotional - which in turn have informed my desire to weave such narratives into the film form to trace the journeys of the displaced, the disenfranchised, the broken, and the healing.

DawnSong is essentially a narrative exploration of those hurt by circumstances not entirely within their control, by systems and hierarchies of oppression and marginalisation, and by the people around them, sometimes inadvertently. At the same time, it’s also essentially about healing from those hurts, literally and metaphysically.

In light of the climate of an increase in anxieties around the increasing subjugation of those marginalised, around the world, as well as in India, which is experiencing a historic high in the numbers of mob-lynching of Muslims, Dalits and transfolks by Hindu-supremacist mobs backed by the ruling dispensation of the country, that has also put the northern state of Kashmir under a military-occupation-like lockdown, I wished to make a film to highlight my own protest against the majoritarian oppression, and thereby, to conflate my own political identity, my identity as a non-binary queer person, and my own personal experiences of loving and losing family and friends, with those of the primary characters on screen.

And finally, I hoped that this film would also underline the essential idea that life is a series of stories we dream up, some of which we hold secretly within, some which we tell others, out loud, but all of which, we must be intensely alive to.