Tribeny Rai interview: ‘Sikkim lives in my mind as pieces of places, people, sounds’

In a year that has seen strong showings from Indian independents across sections, the film by 34-year-old Rai was also screened in the New Directors’ section at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in Spain. The section, which has previously launched filmmakers like Bong Joon-ho and Carla Simón, is reserved for debut or second features that break new ground. Shape of Momo, a co-production between India and South Korea, is a lyrical exploration of womanhood and the emotional geographies of home.

Rai is a graduate of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata, with a specialisation in Direction and Screenplay Writing, and has spent over a decade honing her craft through short films, documentaries, and workshops before arriving at her feature debut. Her company, Dalley Khorsani Productions, earlier produced Rai’s award-winning short, Yathawat (As It Is), which tells the story of three sisters and their mother in Kolkata who are trying to secure a government job for the youngest sister as compensation after their father’s death.

The language of her memory

Executive-produced by Mike Goodridge (of Triangle of Sadness fame) and produced in collaboration with Kathkala Films and Aizoa Pictures, Shape of Momo follows Bishnu, a young woman who returns home after years away, only to find that home no longer fits the way it once did. Played by Gaumaya Gurung, Bishnu inhabits a world of women, silence, and slow transformations, a narrative about belonging and estrangement that mirrors the filmmaker’s own journey.

Born and raised in Nandok, Rai represents a new kind of Himalayan storyteller: local in gaze, global in grammar. She has been hailed as the first woman filmmaker from Sikkim to win at Busan. What does this recognition and validation mean to her for her very first feature? “Where I come from, this recognition means a lot — for filmmakers, regardless of gender,” she says. “I’m deeply grateful, though I also see awards as passing reflections of a moment rather than measures of a film’s true spirit. It’s brought visibility, yes, but our journey would have remained the same with or without it.”

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Rai made a deliberate choice to shoot Shape of Momo entirely in Nepali, her mother tongue. “Language is not just a tool for communication,” she explains. “It embodies thought, identity and feeling. Choosing Nepali was deeply personal: it is the language of my memory, my home and my family. I wanted the film to speak from the most intimate place within me and Nepali carries that truth naturally.” She adds that while other local languages and dialects like Lepcha or Bhutia are beautiful and part of Sikkim’s cultural fabric, she neither speaks nor understands them.

Perhaps that fidelity to her personal truth seems to have struck a chord abroad. “In Hamburg, audiences said we had opened up a different world to them — they were eager to know more about Sikkim,” she recalls. “In Busan and San Sebastián, it felt like home; the audience could relate to every single aspect of the film. These experiences have been rewarding as a filmmaker.”

Home as a moving landscape

One of the most striking things about Shape of Momo is its visual restraint, a patience that refuses to exoticise Sikkim’s lush landscapes. When asked if shooting at home required her to unlearn her own visual memory of the hills, Rai says: “I don’t see it as unlearning, but as returning — returning to a memory that changes each time you revisit it…. When I was shooting in my village, I knew the camera does not simply record reality; it interprets it. What outsiders see is never the whole story. My aim was to capture something that belongs both to memory and to the present; a truth that is neither only how I grew up nor only how the world has shown it.”

Bishnu returns home after years, carrying both guilt and detachment. That emotional texture of being both insider and outsider feels so precise. Did Rai’s own journey — leaving Sikkim for SRFTI in Kolkata and then coming back to her village — inform how she wrote Bishnu’s gaze, her hesitation to belong again? “Bishnu’s gaze comes from my own experience, but now I see it belongs to many others like me, those who leave their home for another city, carrying hope and carrying loss. She has had exposure to the outside world and is accustomed to a certain sense of agency from her life in the city,” says Rai.

She continues: “When she returns to the village, that agency makes her feel somewhat detached, even superior to her surroundings. Yet, the fact that she is a woman makes her deeply vulnerable within that same environment. Her hesitation to belong again is quietly human. Belonging is never fixed. Once we have travelled, we carry pieces of other worlds with us and those pieces change who we are. Belonging means living between where we come from and where we are headed. And perhaps it is a question we can never truly answer.”

Sisterhood of women directors

At first glance, Shape of Momo could be read as a story of female defiance. Rai pushes back against that idea. “The film is not just about female defiance,” she says. “It’s about the complexity of women as human beings. Bishnu’s story is not a manifesto. I wanted to tell it from within, without framing it as either defiance or victimhood.”

She adds, “We made a conscious choice to move the film away from picturesque representation, or the way villagers are often portrayed as simpletons. I wanted to give the characters the dignity of complexity that all human beings carry.”

That emotional integrity has drawn comparisons with filmmakers like Pema Tseden and Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose films often rely on silence and stillness. Rai’s influences are equally contemplative: “I’ve always been drawn to cinema that uses observation as exploration,” she says. “Filmmakers like Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Jia Zhangke have deeply influenced me; Ceylan’s films look inward into the psychological and philosophical terrains of human life, while Jia looks outward, at the social, political and historical shifts that define our existence. Both are so quietly attentive to how people live, think and change.”

Rai’s success comes at a moment when independent filmmakers from India’s Northeast are finally gaining visibility on international platforms. Lakshmipriya Devi’s Manipuri film, Boong, her debut backed by Farhan Akhtar, was screened as the Spotlight Film at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne in August, and had its theatrical release in September.

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However, films from this region remain marginal in discourse around Indian cinema. “It’s true that films from the Northeast are often seen as peripheral within the larger Indian film conversation even though there’s so much diversity and vitality here,” she notes. “No single film can break that barrier. It takes time, consistent work, and a shift in how we look at cinema from the margins — not as regional curiosities, but as part of the country’s larger cinematic voice.”

Rai situates herself within a growing sisterhood of women directors — Payal Kapadia, Rima Das, and others — who have made their mark on the festival circuit. “Many of us are drawn to filmmaking not just as a career, but as inquiry: to question, to unlearn, to look at the world differently,” she says. “That gives our films a certain honesty and intimacy.”

Building from the ground up

Much of Shape of Momo’s strength lies in its collaborative spirit. Rai’s crew was composed largely of fellow SRFTI and FTII graduates, including co-writer, co-editor, and producer Kislay. “Since filmmaking is a collaborative process, it’s essential to have people who resonate with the story you want to tell. It helped me tremendously to work with people who come from the same school of cinema because we share a similar understanding of film language, work ethic and creative approach,” she says.

Her team’s shared vocabulary also allowed for creative risk-taking within constraints. “They understood the challenges of working in a region with limited resources and budget,” Rai explains. “Because, in a way, we’ve been trained to find strength and creativity within those limitations.” For Rai, the journey of Shape of Momo is far from over: “Making the film is just the first step. What comes after — distribution, promotion, connecting with audiences — can be even more challenging, especially for a smaller-language film like Nepali.”

She adds: “We are now trying to find the right path for Shape of Momo to reach audiences beyond the festival circuit. The plan is to bring the film to Nepali-speaking communities across India and abroad through select screenings and community-led events before it eventually finds a suitable streaming platform. The barriers are limited visibility for smaller-language films, lack of formal distribution channels and the constant challenge of marketing a film without big resources. But I believe the film will find its way slowly, through word of mouth and the sincerity with which it was made.”

Now that Shape of Momo has travelled and found acclaim, what does she want to break away from in her next project? Is she tempted by scale, genre, or does she see herself staying with these smaller, interior stories? “I think I’ll always be protective of the intimacy and rootedness of the film because they come from my own lived experience. For now, I don’t want to consciously break away from anything; I want to let the next story show me the way. Whether that path takes me toward scale, genre or something quieter, what matters most is remaining faithful to the world I am telling,” she says.