Kolkata: SRFTI alumna Tribeny Rai’s upcoming feature film, ‘A Chronicle of Minor Things’, has bagged the top honour at Busan’s Asian Project Market. Currently in development, the story follows the investigation into a teen girl’s death.The tenth-batch alumna of SRFTI earned two major accolades at the 21st Asian Contents & Film Market closing ceremony, including the APM Busan Award which features a $15,000 cash prize, and the Sorfond Award which secures an invitation to Norway’s Sorfond Pitching Forum. “The project is still at an early stage of development. After the incredible journey of my debut film, ‘Shape of Momo’, these two awards are deeply encouraging,” Rai told TOI on her way back to Kolkata from Busan on Wednesday.Rai’s film premise centres on the incident of a 15-year-old girl found hanging from a tree at dawn. Before her body can even be brought down, two villagers argue over whose jurisdiction she died in: the tree’s roots stand in one, the branch she hangs from reaches into another. Even in death, she has become a boundary dispute.While her previous work, ‘Shape of Momo’, explored the intimate world of a house full of women and their interpersonal relationships, this new project aims to examine her village closely. Rai noted that the village becomes a microcosm where power, money, and politics enter ordinary life in intimate ways, until people stop seeing them as systems at all. “I am always drawn to stories that feel urgent to me in the present moment. And, with everything happening in the world right now, I feel this is an important time to be telling this story,” she said.Discussing what she hopes to convey to the audience, Rai explained that she wants to “create a world deeply specific to the village while allowing viewers to gradually to recognise their own world within it. I want the film to leave behind a quiet, unsettling realisation-this is not a world apart from ours; it is the world we already live in,” she said.However, she is worried about how her juniors will be able to pursue art practices in the current environment of the institute. “I have always credited my achievements to SRFTI. It taught me not just the craft of filmmaking, but how to think critically, introspect, question my own position, observe the world around me, and see those denied dignity and opportunity. These are the very foundations of a filmmaker. Today, I worry about how students can develop these faculties in an environment of fear, violence, and impunity. You cannot nurture artists by silencing them. Art needs freedom, and institutions must protect it,” Rai said.
