In Tribeny Rai’s feature debut, Shape of Momo (2025), the filmmaker turns her camera toward the quiet rhythms of daily life in rural Sikkim. The 114-minute drama follows three generations of women, each shaped by expectations, endurance and small acts of defiance. Shape of Momo unfolds with a quiet, observational rhythm, where meaning builds through pauses and gestures rather than plot. Instead of dramatic confrontations, Rai lingers on the subtleties of emotion and the invisible structures that shape women’s lives. She speaks about restraint as a form of resistance, the unseen power of patriarchy and how silence can sometimes reveal more than speech.

Shape of Momo premiered at the 2025 Busan International Film Festival in the Vision section, where it won two awards. At the recently concluded 31st Kolkata International Film Festival, it won Best Film in the Indian Language category. Shape of Momo will also be screened at the upcoming International Film Festival of India as part of the Indian Panorama, where the director will compete for the Best Debut Feature award.

In this interview, Rai discusses her minimalist approach, the inner emotional lives of her characters and Shape of Momo’s engagement with patriarchy and class.

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Dipankar Sarkar: How did your experience of growing up in Sikkim inform your gaze, particularly your ability to perceive the region both as an insider and observer?

Tribeny Rai: Growing up in Sikkim, I learned early that belonging could be fragile. There is a law that takes away a Sikkimese woman’s rights if she marries a non-Sikkimese man. Knowing this as a child made me understand why girls were treated with more caution and why boys were preferred.

Living with that vulnerability sharpened my awareness of others’ vulnerabilities too. It taught me to watch my world closely, both from within it and slightly outside it. That dual gaze, I think, is what naturally found its way into my filmmaking.

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DS: You co-wrote Shape of Momo with Kislay, and together you’ve created a script that feels both sharp and deeply empathetic. How did you work together to balance the inner lives of the characters with the larger social themes running through the story?

TR: I brought my own lived experiences and Kislay brought the clarity of an outside gaze. When he came to Sikkim to work on the script, he saw me within the world that had shaped this story. Because the film is something I am living even now, our process became a kind of shared observation. My inner life met his distance, and his distance gave shape to things I could not always articulate. We used those lived moments and his observations to find the right balance. We both felt strongly that a personal story cannot stand without the social context that shapes it.

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DS: Much of the film’s power lies in how the patriarchy is rendered as absent rather than overtly dominant. What drew you to portray these structures through the quieter ways they show up in the fabric of routine?

TR: I grew up in a house full of women, and I learned early that [the] patriarchy doesn’t need a man to be present to shape a home. It can live in habits, fears and expectations that pass from one generation to the next. That quietness interested me more than any loud expression of power.

We wanted the film to carry that same silence, where the weight of the patriarchy appears in routine, in small decisions, in the things left unsaid. Even the male characters were written with this in mind. Gyan, Bishnu’s love interest, doesn’t walk in like a villain. He is educated, gentle and still shaped by old ideas. That quiet form felt truer to the world I know.

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DS: Bishnu’s progressiveness often tips into being strong-willed and outspoken, especially in her dealings with her mother, while her sense of entitlement contrasts with the tenant family’s struggles. Were you interested in exploring how urban ideas of freedom and equality collide with traditional life?

TR: Absolutely. While we were critiquing how village life is far from the picturesque image we are often given, it was just as important for us to critique Bishnu and her modern ways. In today’s world, a woman can be called difficult very easily, and it can be hard for an audience to fully empathize with someone like her. But that was a risk Kislay and I wanted to take.

A lot of Bishnu’s uptightness also comes from her fear of exploitation. She worries constantly that people might take advantage of her mother. When you’ve felt vulnerable your whole life, you build a strong wall around yourself, and Bishnu carries that wall everywhere.

Stories of empowerment are usually led by women who fit society’s idea of being righteous. We wanted someone more real; a flawed protagonist shaped by both her beliefs and her blind spots. Her story wouldn’t have felt honest without acknowledging her privilege and her class.

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DS: The four women — a grandmother, mother and two daughters — each find their own way to endure. How did you shape their differences so that womanhood feels both inherited and inwardly challenged by each generation?

TR: Each of the four women carries a different way of surviving, and we wanted those differences to feel natural, almost like they grew out of the same soil but bent in their own direction. The grandmother represents a kind of endurance that comes from acceptance because she has known no other world, whereas the mother carries both obedience and small acts of resistance but not enough support to break free from them. The two daughters, especially Bishnu, push against what they’ve inherited. They test the boundaries — sometimes blindly, sometimes boldly. Their challenges come from living in a world where new ideas reach them faster than change does. Shaping them this way allowed womanhood to feel both passed down and questioned at every step. Each generation inherits the weight, but each one also finds a slightly different way of carrying it.

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DS: There’s a faint current of unease and tension within the household, arising from the migrants camped nearby and the decision to involve the police instead of the village elders. What purpose does this undercurrent serve in your narrative design?

TR: I’ve often noticed that men usually challenge only those within their own class. A security guard will rarely confront his employer, for instance. But this barrier doesn’t hold when it comes to women, as class offers them little protection. Even in an affluent household of women, the presence of outsiders can still feel threatening. We wanted that unease to run quietly through the film. In cities, there are systems meant to handle such disturbances, and Bishnu tries to rely on the same idea in the village. But she slowly realizes that in a traditional setup, those systems bend toward men. That undercurrent of tension reminds us how fragile their world is, and how easily it can be disrupted, even from the outside.

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DS: The Himalayan setting looks beautiful in Shape of Momo, but it is never romanticized. How did you and cinematographer Archana Ghangrekar decide to show the landscape as part of the characters’ emotions rather than as scenic beauty?

TR: We kept returning to that famous line by [Fyodor] Dostoevsky, “beauty will save the world.” But in some way, we wanted to gently disarm it. For those of us who live in these landscapes, beauty and difficulty often exist together. From the very beginning, Archana understood this. Even during the writing stage, she sensed that we didn’t want to glorify the mountains. We wanted the landscape to sit beside the characters, to echo their emotions rather than distract from them. She always brought several ways of shooting a scene, each one trying to find that balance in the beauty that exists but also the truth beneath it.

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DS: The sound design carries its own emotion through the hum of chores and the pauses between words. How did you use silence and ambient sound to convey the characters’ inner emotions?

TR: We designed the sound so that the ambient world slowly fades as the film progresses. In the beginning, you hear the hum of chores, the house, the village — all the sounds that hold their daily life together. But as their inner tensions deepen, we start removing those layers. By the final scene, the ambient sound is almost gone, creating a kind of emotional emptiness where their inner state becomes clearer than the world outside.

We also used the cuckoo as a recurring element. I have a personal connection to that sound, and I wanted it to appear in moments where it quietly underlines something.

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DS: As the end credits roll, Shape of Momo feels less like closure and more like an awakening. What does resolution mean to you in a tale where resistance itself becomes an everyday act?

TR: For me, resolution doesn’t always mean something is solved. It can also mean that a character has finally learned to see her world more clearly. In a story like this, where the struggle is woven into daily life, resistance is not dramatic. It is quiet, often tiring and repeated every day. So, a definite ending would have felt false.

What mattered more was a sense of awakening — a small shift in how Bishnu understands herself, her family and the limits around her. The external world doesn’t change but something inside her does. And sometimes that is the only resolution possible in a place where change comes very slowly.

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DS: From participating in the Work-in-Progress Lab at NFDC Film Bazaar to winning awards at the Busan International Film Festival and the Kolkata International Film Festival, and now competing for Best Debut at IFFI Goa, how would you sum up this journey?

TR: It has been overwhelming in the best way. The support and mentorship we received at the Work-in-Progress Lab at NFDC Film Bazaar were deeply valuable. The awards at Busan and [the] Kolkata International Film Festival have given our film tremendous credibility. And now, to compete for Best Debut at IFFI Goa, it feels like the team’s hard work has truly materialized. This journey has been a slow, steady affirmation that a small story made with honesty can find its own path in the world.

Dipankar Sarkar (@Dipankar_Tezpur) is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic based in India. As a freelancer, he regularly contributes to various Indian publications on cinema-related topics.

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