Original Title : Why can’t I recall my father’s dreams ?
Year : 2026
Language : Assamese, English
Duration : 11 minutes 11 seconds
Shooting Format : Digital
Genre : Experimental Documentary, Video Art
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Crew :
Writer, Director : Mehdi Jahan
Producer : Mehdi Jahan
Camera : Sunayana Singh, Mehdi Jahan
Editor : Mehdi Jahan
Sound Design and Mix : Mehdi Jahan
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Synopsis :
My father often spoke of a recurrent dream where the bodies of young men and women who had died during the decades of violence that engulfed Assam transformed into swans. Once a year, they gathered at the courtyard of my father’s ancestral home and sang a powerful melody that evoked despair and hope in equal measure. He believed the song existed somewhere beyond memory, and he spent much of his life searching for it, convinced that if he could recall it, his own wounds might heal. However, the elusive melody remained out of reach. My mother fears that one day she will forget my father entirely, that his gestures, voice, even his silences will erode quietly inside her. Yet she wonders, almost against her will, whether forgetting might also be a form of return. Perhaps in the space left behind by memory, the song of the swans will surface again. Perhaps forgetting is not erasure but another path toward what could never be held. I want to forget the dream because it binds me to a longing my father carried his entire life, a longing that never found its object. The dream hurts because it speaks of a justice that never arrived, of a mourning that never ended. It reminds me that the violence did not disappear entirely and it continues to echo inside those who survived it. This film is an attempt to let go of the dream my father could not relinquish, to loosen its grip on my own inheritance of grief.