The Latest from India’s Most Enrapturing Filmmaker
Dominic Sangma’s new film "Rimdogittanga" (or "Rapture") combines violence, politics, and spirituality
"Rapture" is partially told through the eyes of a young boy, Kasan, played thoughtfully by Torikhu A. Sangma.
Anna Films
Words by Siddhant Adlakha
This year, the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland played host to Rimdogittanga (or Rapture), the absorbing second feature by Indian filmmaker Dominic Megam Sangma, a graduate of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, named for one of the country’s most prolific directors. Sangma is only 36, but in a just world, his name would be as recognizable to global cinephiles as the legendary Ray’s; stylistically, his work sits comfortably alongside that of Thai arthouse maestro Apichatpong Weerasethakul (of such esoteric masterpieces as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Syndromes and a Century), though hasn’t been as widely distributed. Hailing from Meghalaya—an eastern state often underrepresented in conversations on Indian cinema—Sangma’s small scale Garo-language films are filled with big ideas, and display both the careful compositions of a born aesthete, as well as the profound spirituality of someone wise beyond his years.
The premise of Rimdogittanga speaks to prophecies and superstitions in the rural part of India where Sangma grew up. In it, the mysterious disappearance of a young man leads a small village to become engulfed by fear and prejudice, a tale told partially through the eyes of a young boy, Kasan, played thoughtfully by Torikhu A. Sangma (no relation; Sangma is a common Garo surname). However, it occasionally unfolds from an omniscient perspective too, transforming mere cinematic observation into a meditative act. The story emanates from Sangma’s childhood memories, as a kid who suffered from night blindness, and who was made to fear interlopers and outsiders rumored to be kidnappers lurking in the darkness. Kasan suffers a similar malady, in addition to facial and limbic deformities that make him more vulnerable to the bullying of his peers, and to surrounding dangers.
From its opening frames—set to the melody of insects trilling in the dead of night—the film reveals its dynamic between hints of light and enveloping darkness, a theme that recurs both visually and narratively. Flame torches flicker in the distance, as villagers embark on a nighttime harvest of rare cicadas—a local delicacy—which emerge once every few years. The camera, in these scenes, floats as if detached from any Earthly realm, capturing this local ritual through an ethereal lens. However, this freewheeling, quick-moving visual approach is reserved for only a handful of vital scenes. In the meantime, Sangma and cinematographer Tojo Xavier switch storytelling modes as soon as the plot begins, and Kasan’s teenage uncle Mangkunchi disappears without a trace—except for his shirt, found high up in a tree. As the local pastor (Celstine K. Sangma) and other villagers begin speculating on these circumstances, they’re overcome with collective caution that soon turns to pressing paranoia. However, in portraying the workaday mundanities of this village, as it grows increasingly on edge, Sangma takes a withheld approach. He captures people from afar as they traverse bridges and dirt roads, and debate a supposed oncoming darkness at the local church (a darkness whose cure, the pastor posits, is candlelight displayed at every doorway, akin to the blood of lambs at Passover).
Dominic Megam Sangma's "Rapture" follows a rural Indian town after a local teen disappears.
Anna Films
In these transitionary scenes, the subtle, poetic movement of the camera across open space feels in tune with the rhythms of nature, as though the trees, or the wind, were suggesting the film’s moral trajectory by focusing its gaze. Rimdogittanga is, after all, a morality play about a community’s descent into fear and shocking violence, but it’s one whose moral dimensions are fundamentally inseparable from its religious musings. For instance, an older relative of Kasan’s is a coffin maker, keeping the young child in constant proximity to death, while the pastor’s personal subplots (about corruption and infidelity) seldom unfold without the question of their broader implications for the oncoming apocalypse of which he speaks. Without doing so in words, the film suggests—through its lingering, introspective portraits of each character—the possibility that any oncoming rapture could be self-inflicted through sin, or worse yet, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The fear and violence at hand are magnified by the looming specter of mortality. Sangma dealt with this theme in his first film too, the spiritually rigorous and uniquely dreamlike slow-burn Ma’Ama, in 2018. In it, Sangma’s father, the late Phillip O. Sangma, plays a version of himself, and embarks on a journey to answer questions about his long-dead wife—primarily, whether she’ll appear to him in the afterlife as an old woman, or at the young age at which she died. This film, too, was catalyzed by Sangma’s personal memories—or his lack thereof. His mother died when he was young, and Ma’Ama plays like a cinematic act of yearning for closure, through questions that may never be answered. (As for its availability: Ma’Ama’s planned 2020 release was thwarted by COVID closures, but it may finally see a theatrical rollout in northeast India this year).
Like Ma’Ama—the first in a planned trilogy drawn from Sangma’s memories—Rimdogittanga centers unanswerable existential questions. But rather than filtering these through one man’s journey, the film examines them through the anxieties of an entire community. The fear of death quickly morphs into a fear of the “other,” in a manner similar to Cristian Mungiu’s recent Romanian masterpiece R.M.N., which explores the turning tides of a town that rejects recent immigrants due to Islamophobic fears. A similar cultural dynamic crops up in Rimdogittanga, paying due diligence to India’s ongoing political climate and South Asia’s various migrant crises just out of view. But where Mungiu’s depiction of these fears was (for the most part) literal, Sangma conversely extracts their underlying spiritual dimensions, as both a result of and a clash with local traditions (those brought over by Christian missionaries, as well as those much older).
A recurring theme in "Rapture" is the dynamic between light and enveloping darkness.
Anna Films
This paradox is embodied by the film’s constant battle between light and shadow in every scene, and it ultimately takes the form of a brief but shatteringly moving vision of a realm between realms—an afterlife of sorts, or perhaps some place deep within the soul, as it ruminates on questions of the self. (For what it’s worth, it’s a scene that feels deeply in conversation with Ma’Ama, though the narrative and visual answers it offers are just as oblique). But this beauty is offset by a certain heinousness that lurks just beneath the township’s surface. Although the film eventually erupts into moments of gut-churning violence, its true ugliness is found in subtler, quoted moments. Sangma, on occasion, breaks his withheld visual mold and allows the camera to push forward towards certain characters, as they make vital decisions that will affect the future of both Kasan and the village as a whole. This sudden, unexpected camera movement feels urgently spurred on by morality twisting and contorting in real time, embodying a shift of the ground beneath the characters’ feet. The ethical implications of these decisions only exist within the imagination at first, but they soon unfurl at crossroads that cannot be re-tread; they’re thresholds that cannot be un-crossed.
After extended stretches of stillness and only gentle camera moves, pushing invasively into the characters’ orbits is practically anxiety inducing, drawing us dangerously close to an overwhelming zealous rot. Decisions as simple as whether to leave the community, or which of its ugly secrets to keep, begin to feel like the irreversible opening of Pandora’s box.
A tale of politics, prejudice, and compartmentalized justifications, Rimdogittanga takes these elements of the contemporary morality play and performs a cinematic offering, giving them over—in sacrificial gesture—to unseen, all-encompassing questions about the universe, and about the physical and meta-physical worlds. Sangma creates, in the process, a tension of the spirit and a crisis of ethics at every turn—as if to wonder, through images, what we become (and, in the film’s religious parlance, where we “go”) when we give ourselves over to the grotesqueries of the human soul.
Published on August 24, 2023
Words by Siddhant Adlakha
Siddhant Adlakha is a critic and filmmaker from Mumbai, though he now lives in New York City. They're more similar than you'd think. Find him at @SiddhantAdlakha on Twitter