Léalo en español
Call it utopian sci fi, or the fertile cross-pollination of women thinkers across time and space, but Sultana’s Dream (El sueño de la sultana) takes the audience on a fantasy journey that is as delightful as it is educational.
This animated feature film, Spanish director Isabel Herguera’s first long-form work, is inspired by a story of the same title by Muslim teacher and writer Rokeya Hossain (1880-1932), born in Bengal and buried in the courtyard of a school because she was refused the Muslim cemetery. After catching attention in San Sebastian’s Official Selection, it is bound to spread its wings over festivals and art houses, following in the footsteps of such feminist animation classics as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007) and Yonfan’s No. 7 Cherry Lane (2019).
Herguera and co-screenwriter Gianmarco Serra tell their fantastic stories through the eyes of a young back-packing artist and filmmaker, Inés, whose trips between Spain and India form the backbone of the film. The fact that every face in the film is colored a warm, rich brown underlines the universality of this story and the connection between Europeans and Indians of different races and religions – it’s a story exploring men and women, after all.
Initially, Inès goes to Ahmadabad to see her eccentric lover Amar, an artist whose impulsive spontaneity often leaves her on her own. In one sequence she dons a white headscarf to visit a mosque with him, but he gets distracted playing with some children and she finds herself surrounded by a wall of hostile-looking men, then by a sea of identically masked women cradling infants. One of them identifies herself as a Frenchwoman and hands her a business card, on which is written Attorney; the woman claims she has found freedom in this restricted life.
In another scene, Inés and her Indian friend Sudanya go to Vrindavan, the city of Lord Krsna, also known as the City of Widows. Here, too, they find a cultural wall that prevents them from exchanging ideas with a group of white-robed Hindi widows gathered in a small temple. It is only when Inés takes a bus to Bangladesh on the track of Rokeya Hossain that the barriers break down, both in the writer’s real-life educational projects for the Muslim women of her day, and in her dream of Ladyland, where women fill the streets and perform all the jobs, safe from the men who are kept at home where they can do no harm.
As might be expected, the utopian vision of Ladyland, filled with winged flying machines and joyful women scientists, is a highlight of the film. The 2D ink and watercolor drawings prevalent in other sections of the film give way to the intricacies of repetitive decorative designs using traditional Indian techniques like Mehndi. Rokeya herself appears in the story as a pigtailed girl who learns Bengali and English before getting married at 16, then starts a school for women when her husband dies young.
It is striking that the theme of women’s safety is so recurrent. Riding around in rickshaws, Inés often seems uneasy, and her fears are literalized when the vehicle is attacked without provocation by a band of furious monkeys. One Indian woman suggests hopefully that at least women are safe in Europe, but Inés replies they are safe nowhere in the world, and the film ends with a frightening final sequence that emphasizes this negativity.
Perhaps – unlike a far-out fantasy like the Venice Golden Lion winner Poor Things – Sultana’s Dream is, in the end, just more grounded in reality and knows the dangers posed by the ceaseless male gaze. After all, even Rokeya Hossain could find no better method to bring girls to her school than hiding them away inside a carriage draped in black from head to toe. And there are many moments when Inés seems to have conquered sexual threats to live a life of her choosing; in fact, the very creativity of the animated design lifts the spirits. But there is a dark cloud deep in the story that never completely goes away.
This is a film woven out of so many creative threads, they threaten to come permanently loose in the course of dreams, time travel, fantasies and everything else. The fearless Inés (sophisticatedly voiced by Miren Arrieta) journeys around the globe, meeting real-life people of today as well as yesteryear. One of them is Paul B. Preciado, the radical Spanish philosopher and writer (and director of the recent film Orlando, My Political Biography) who exchanges ideas with inés and her oceanographer mother at a chic art show. Throughout her travels Inés writes to Paul, who encourages her to dream and experiment with her life.
Inés also has a flashy father modeled on/played by Italian producer Roberto Bessi, who drives her around Rome at the time of Hollywood on the Tiber, in the heyday of Cinecittà, Fellini and Mastroianni – though Bollywood mysteriously also figures into Dad’s extravagant productions.
An especially delightful cameo belongs to British classicist Dame Mary Beard, whose animated avatar tells a riveting story about “the first man who told a woman to shut up.” This, in Beard’s estimation, is Telemachus, the son of Odysseus in ancient Greece, who sent his mom Penelope back upstairs to the women’s quarters when she asked a court musician to play something more cheery.
Director: Isabel Herguera
Screenplay: Isabel Herguera, Gianmarco Serra
Voice cast: Miren Arrieta, Mary Beard, Mireia Gabilondo , Maurizio Faraoni, Manu Khurana, Arunima Bhattacharya, Ranjitha Rajeevan, Paul B. Preciado
Producers: Diego Herguera, Mariano Baratech, Chelo Loureiro, Ivan Minambres, Fabian Driehorst
Cinematography: Eduardo Elosegi
Editing: Gianmarco Serra
Music: Moushumi Bhowmick, Tajdar Junaid
Sound: Gianmarco Serra, Simon Bastian
Production companies: Sultana Films (Spain), Gatoverde Producciones SL (Spain), Abano Produciones SL (Spain), Uniko Creative Studio (Spain), Fabian&Fred (Germany)
World Sales: Square Eyes (Austria)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Official selection)
In Bengali, Spanish, Basque, Hindi, English, Italian
86 minutes
