Author name: Festival Writer

A home is meant to be a safe haven a place of shelter and stability that plays a crucial role in everyday life. Yet its function can be deeply compromised by the surrounding environment. One of the gravest challenges is flooding: it not only damages property but disrupts daily routines, limits mobility, isolates access, and halts education, income, and other essential activities. This disruption creates an ongoing instability for affected communities. Dulhaji Dolena, a documentary by Anita Reza Zein, captures this reality through a cinéma vérité approach, where the filmmaker is actively present, documenting the life of Dulhaji as he navigates a village perpetually submerged by tidal flooding.

A father is often seen as the bearer of the heaviest burdens within a household. He is expected to provide, to protect, and to endure life’s pressures to ensure the survival of his family. But what happens when the very system designed to support society actually obstructs a father’s ability to meet his family’s most basic needs such as access to nutritious food?

What are we supposed to do when the most precious thing in life is taken away too soon, too suddenly, and far too painfully? Especially when we are still so young, our souls still fragile, and the world still unexplored. How do children, who haven’t even learned how to cope with pain, swallow a reality they never asked for? How do they react when the world they know suddenly shifts, crumbles, and leaves only emptiness?

What happens when a classic love story like the Ramayana is no longer portrayed on a grand stage, but instead grounded in the raw, unforgiving reality of urban street life beneath tattered traditional costumes, amid the roar of traffic and the glow of streetlights that never truly dim?