Pranami Koch: An Emerging Voice in Assamese cinema

Pranami Koch is a queer, indigenous multimedia artist, designer, and filmmaker based in Assam, with a focus on the politics of gender and identity. The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2024 has selected her recent film "Echoes Within" (Koro Gochongni), which she also edited, for the shorts category. She made this second short nonfiction with the support of Rough Edges (Uncode Fellowship), Generator Co-Operative Art Production Fund (Experimenter), and Sandbox Collective (Gender Bender).

The Flow of Resilience (Boi Thaka), her directorial debut and graduation project from the National Institute of Design, made its premiere at the International Documentary Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) and now has a scheduled premiere at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) in 2024. She is currently working on her research project, "What Would it Mean to See a Cobra in a Dream?" for which she has received the Zubaan Young Researcher's Grant for 2023-2024.

"Echoes Within" embarks on the filmmaker’s journey to reconstruct her lost ancestral identity as a Koch woman, engaging with themes of nostalgic dreaming, loss, and an imagined sense of belonging. Koch seeks to unearth traces of her grandmother, whom she has never encountered, through the narratives of her father and the women of her community—Aja, Anung, and Abu—who reside within the matrilineal society of Northeast India. The matrilineal context familiar to her grandmother and great-grandmother has transformed into a remote and almost intangible realm that continues to captivate her, with remnants still perceptible in Harisong.

The film critically examines the psychological dimensions of a queer woman as she navigates her identity while grappling with feelings of angst, confusion, and the quest for certainty regarding her desires, all amidst the erasure of her identity by dominant religious and patriarchal structures that shape her individual experiences, aspirations, and longings.

Through a nuanced interplay of memory and imagination, Koch discovers solace in defiance, self-expression, and affirmation, even as the erosion of her original language and indigenous culture becomes increasingly pronounced. The phenomenon of Sanskritization, which endeavours to shape India's diverse sociocultural landscape into a homogenised Hindu identity, underlines this loss. "Echoes Within" intricately interlaces experiential components, conceptual frameworks, and appropriated narratives, traversing the individual and collective memories within a society compelled to overlook its animistic roots.

Key contributions to the film include direction and editing by Pranami Koch, production by Pranami Koch (Michala Productions), cinematography and colour grading by Shrutiman Deori, sound contributions from both Pranami Koch and Shrutiman Deori, sound design by Eemon Koch, and music by Rishikesh Thangjam.