Bappadittya Sarkar’s Collective Dreams Stitched into December (2025; YIDFF 2025, New Asian Currents) attempts to position the city of Jaipur as a constellation of resistance sites, set within the timeframe of a year-end winter. The film opens with a scene of a community screening and discussion in a modest living room. The ephemera on the wall indicate a stance (Audre Lorde quote, Palestine posters) shared by the young people attending. Serkar goes on to give a direct reckoning of two cases affecting the region: the government’s appropriation of farmland in order to build a massive tiger reserve in Dholpur and Karauli districts, and the celebration of Equality Day in memory of Dr. B.B.R. Ambedkar, who burned the legal codex Manu Smriti and thus declared emancipation for Dalit people in the eye of the law, including the rights to access public facilities.

Documenting the farmland issue, the camera attends a townhall-style meeting of farmers, local people, and organizers who are impacted by the reserve project. The issues surrounding Equality Day are exposed in a public demonstration against the failure of legislative representatives to fulfill their glib promises about the reality of emancipation.

These scenes, though bracing in their directness, fail to locate the beating heart of the struggle of Rajashtani laborers. Collective Dreams is at its best when it foregoes straightforward talking-head exposition for a more intimate visual signature. The climate and the body, per the film, experience an analogous winter. The cold period is counterbalanced by heat, be it a literal burning fire or a metaphorical one such as dissents or clashes. In a best-case scenario, this thermodynamics will create exuberance. In other words: a sign of life.

Assembling the unseen web of proletarian life in Jaipur, the film concerns itself with temperature and temperament: newspapermen keeping themselves warm on a freezing morning; menial workers laboring away in drudgery; the rhythm of urbanity contrasted with grand monuments of the colonial past. When a lake appears onscreen, it is so still and dusty-blue that one might wonder if its depth actually conceals any malice. Shredded cottons are recorded up-close like footage of a flaming furnace, looking convincingly hotter than artificial hearth.

It is in subtle moments like these that the film achieves a peak of exuberance, via fiery private encounters, instead of the ponderous display of dissents and clashes. Compacting both sides of its construction within an hourlong duration, Collective Dreams rations the portions unevenly, resulting in a lack of clarity. The stitches could use a bigger needle and stronger threads. Sarkar tries to bridge the two parts of the film with a poetry recitation that exalts the narrative of local politics into gory allegorical verses (“blood begins to pour, as the deer, now motionless…”), but the parts remain out of alignment. Ultimately, the portrait of the filmmaker’s hometown resembles a collection of unfinished sketches.

by Innas Tsuroiya