Tribeny Rai Made a Film About Women. Everyone Should Watch It

I’m told she does her media interviews by travelling to a nearby city because the internet is a problem where she’s currently based. And that makes my mind drift to a fictional Jafar Panahi film. A frazzled filmmaker, fresh off a prestigious film festival trip and basking in rare good reviews, making the unlikely schlep to the closest thing she can call civilisation.

But she disagrees. “I don’t think my situation is anywhere close to the filmmaker in Panahi’s film,” says Tribeny Rai, whose debut film, Shape of Momo, which has screened at film festivals in San Sebastián, Glasgow, Göteborg, Hong Kong, Hamburg, is now in theatres and earning rave reviews. Shape of Momo follows Bishnu, a progressive 30-something who quits her cushy job in Delhi and returns to her Himalayan hometown. And there, she confronts the suffocating, deeply ingrained patriarchal expectations of her multi-generational all-female household.

The Sikkimese filmmaker is aware of the projection her part of the world encounters. “Coming from the hills, there is often an invisible distance from the larger media and industry infrastructure. Access is centralised elsewhere. That is just the practical reality many of us work within.”

Rai’s film, delicate and damning by turns, is a ray of light dancing on the surface of the rippling ocean. She says that constraints shape cinema in unexpected ways. “Independent filmmaking from places like ours has always been built on limitations—financial, geographical, institutional. You learn to improvise, to work collectively, to tell stories with honesty instead of scale. Sometimes constraints force you to discover your own cinematic language. What matters most is whether you continue to observe deeply and remain emotionally truthful to the world you come from.”

With the film continuing to make waves, we spoke with Rai on filmmaking, women’s inner lives and the kind of cinema she gets behind. Edited excerpts:

Were you ever conscious that you were making a film about a cultural icon with a whole other contentious conversation—the momo?

We were always aware that momo is far more than a food item in our part of the world. It carries memory, migration, class, labour, identity and the assumptions people make about Himalayan and Nepali communities. That was precisely what interested me. Every culture has its equivalent of momo. A dish made by hand, passed down through generations, inseparable from home. With Shape of Momo, I was interested in what the shape itself represents. How society decides what a woman’s life should look like, how it must be folded, sealed, presented. Neat. Correct. Uniform. Momo has also travelled far beyond its origins and entered mainstream conversations around cultural ownership and visibility. I was conscious of that layered history. But the film ultimately comes from a very intimate and personal place, not from a desire to make a cultural statement.

The comfort of belonging also comes with weight. Shape of Momo explores it but personally, would you choose it?

I think belonging is complicated. It gives you language, memory, community, rootedness. But it can also come with expectations about who you should be and how you should live. That tension is something Shape of Momo explores deeply. 

Personally, I don’t see it as a choice between belonging and freedom. I come from the hills, from a close-knit community, and that has shaped me completely as a person and as a filmmaker. But I also believe love and belonging should leave room for individuality and change. The moment belonging starts demanding conformity, it becomes difficult. 

So, I would still choose belonging. But hopefully one that allows people, especially women, to exist beyond prescribed roles.

You were nominated for the Ingmar Bergman best debut award. When did you first learn of Bergman—which is to essentially ask, when and how did you begin watching cinema that impressed itself deeply upon you?

Being nominated for the Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award was honestly surreal. Bergman was one of those filmmakers who completely changed the way I understood cinema. Coming from the hills, access to film culture was limited in a formal sense. Much of my learning happened through film school at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute. 

While preparing for its entrance, I got my hands on two DVDs: Rashomon (1950) by Kurosawa and a film by Emir Kusturica. I was completely taken aback by their lifelike treatment. I watched and rewatched them every single day as part of my preparation. Until then, cinema for me was largely emotional. That process made me realise how deeply psychological and interior films could be, that cinema could access thoughts and fears people don’t always articulate.

You earlier spoke about being influenced by Jia Zhangke—whose gritty films often depict the churn of globalising China, its social realities and cultural mores. The Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s provenance is also inextricably tied to the deadpan minimalism of his oeuvre. We’ve seen that the mores of places they explore in their films also sometimes shape the tonalities and textures of their storytelling. Coming from Sikkim and with surely a lot of stories waiting in the wings, do you look at a signature style as something that storytelling demands?

What I admire about filmmakers like Jia Zhangke and Aki Kaurismäki is how deeply their films are rooted in the emotional and social realities of the worlds they come from. A filmmaker’s environment inevitably seeps into their cinema, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. Coming from Sikkim, I’ve grown up around people whose lives are constantly shaped by the feeling of being culturally peripheral to mainland narratives. Those realities naturally enter my films.

What I want is for my films to preserve the emotional reality of this place and time, so that years later, someone watching them can understand it fully. Sikkim is often reduced to its landscape, its beauty so overwhelming that it eclipses the people living within it. We have always been a backdrop. Our films are one way of changing that narrative, of becoming the heroes of our own stories.

Style, for me, emerges from my influences, my own concerns, and the demands of the story. I don’t consciously think about creating a signature style. It comes organically from the emotional truth of the story and the people within it. Another story may demand a completely different form. What matters most is being honest to the emotional geography of the people and places I’m filming.

Shape of Momo has done rounds of film festivals the world over. Do you think the reach film festivals give to films compares to the reach they give to red carpet events and influencers? Within the circle, films travelling to festivals is definitely prestigious, but what does it really do for its business?

For an independent film like Shape of Momo, the festival journey was incredibly important. It allowed the film to travel beyond geographical and linguistic boundaries, connecting us to audiences, programmers and fellow filmmakers who may never have encountered a story from our world otherwise. That network has been invaluable to our ecosystem. 

The reality of the industry, however, is shifting. Many festival institutions that once relied on government funding have seen that support shrink, forcing them to depend increasingly on private funding. As a result, red carpet spectacle and commercial visibility often take over, sometimes at the expense of the films themselves. 

Despite this, the festival circuit remains deeply valuable, particularly for films from peripheral worlds like ours. Had it not been for the festival journey, we would probably not be releasing the film with the people we are doing it with. It gives credibility, visibility and a path forward. Though we also have to be honest about how these spaces are changing and what that means for the kinds of stories that get championed within them.

I hate to have to ask this question, but female filmmakers have amassed tons of cred the world over, right from Justine Triet, Celine Song and Greta Gerwig to Payal Kapadia, Sandhya Suri and Shuchi Talati closer home. Do you think it’s a class of cool—exciting and often prestigious company to be in, and not a tag that saddles you anymore? Are you even conscious of you being a ‘female’ filmmaker—because the female experience is certainly what you explore in your film…

I am conscious of the tag because it has taken women filmmakers a very long time to arrive at this moment. In many ways, it is an exciting and important time to be making films as a woman. Seeing filmmakers like Greta Gerwig, Payal Kapadia, Sandhya Suri being recognised globally creates space and possibility for many of us. 

At the same time, I feel an individual’s reality is far more holistic and multilayered. I am a woman, I come from the Northeast, I studied at Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, and all of these experiences intersect and shape the way I see the world. My experience is not limited to being a woman or a person from the Northeast. Everything overlaps and becomes part of who I am. We approached Shape of Momo in a similar way, where the characters are not defined by one identity alone, but by multiple emotional and social realities existing together. 

But I don’t want people to watch the film simply because it is made by a woman filmmaker. I want it to stand on its own artistic and emotional merit. Many of the heads of departments on my film were women, but I never approached that as a statement. They were there because they were the best people for the job. 

I am proud of the tag in the sense that it reflects a larger collective journey and can hopefully enable more women to enter and sustain themselves in cinema. But it should not become a badge or the primary lens through which the work is viewed. Ultimately, the film has to speak for itself.

Your film releases soon, and much like for All We Imagine As Light and Homebound, which benefited from the clout of its director Neeraj Ghaywan as well as its Cannes trip, it’s a great sign for films that are actually films and not circus spectacles or franchise shove-ups. And yet, it’s been a tough time for any film which is not either of those. What exactly is your expectation from the theatrical run of Shape of Momo?

People need all kinds of films. The response to films like All We Imagine as Light and Homebound shows that there is space and curiosity for intimate human stories, even within a landscape dominated by spectacle and franchises. India is such a diverse space that I genuinely believe there is room for every kind of cinema to coexist.

With Shape of Momo, my expectation is honestly very simple. I just want the film to reach people and create an emotional connection with them. The festival journey has already given the film visibility and a life beyond where we imagined it would travel, and the theatrical release feels like bringing it back home to audiences here. 

Every filmmaker wants their film to do well commercially because that determines sustainability and the possibility of making future films. But for me, even getting people into theatres to engage with a quiet, intimate film like this already feels fulfilling.

Which five films would you recommend to the Esquire India reader?

Winter Sleep by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Mirror by Andrey Tarkovsky, Mahanagar by Satyajit Ray, The 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels by Chantal Akerman.