Tractatus Bengalium
189 mins | Bengali with subtitles | South Asia | Experimental Drama | Color
“The body produces discourse.”
This is no mere theory in Tractatus Bengalium—it is praxis, riot, and rupture. The Muslim female body here does not suffer in silence, nor does it seek sympathy. Instead, it acts, and by acting, speaks, dismantling both narrative and norm. Rejecting its age-old cinematic role as a mute vessel of patriarchal projection, the body in this film becomes a site of insurrection, a writing instrument against time, tradition, and the tyranny of the male gaze.
Set in a tropical fever-dream called Dhaka—equal parts polluted sprawl, psychic battleground, and mythological swamp—Tractatus Bengalium is a 189-minute epic of gendered resistance wrapped in the shimmering silk of experimental cinema. Think Persona by way of La Chinoise, but soaked in Bengali sweat and Quranic smoke.
At the center of this controlled chaos are two actresses:
Rushti
Played by Rituporna Sen (Gandu, Berlinale 2011), Rushti is a punk-poet, a Muslim femme, a queer visionary torn between her desire for radical freedom and the coercive scripts of men and markets. Cast in the film-within-the-film as a devout daughter, she subverts every take, every line, with her body—her performance an act of resistance that turns the lens back on its author.
Mitra
Her co-star and lover, Mitra (played by Farhana Hamid Atti), is quieter, but no less dangerous. If Rushti is fire, Mitra is mirror. She reflects, distorts, and finally shatters the fiction she is conscripted into. Her rebellion is slow and architectural, undermining not just the film’s story but its very structure.
Together, they unravel a production helmed by a failing male auteur—a director whose authority erodes in real-time, whose vision is exposed as violence, whose obsession with “truth” reveals itself to be a fetish for domination. The women reject not only his direction, but the very premise of his narrative, re-authoring themselves as subjects in a cinema of refusal.
Around them spin grotesque figures of a decadent society: a pedophilic minister, a manipulative mullah, a holy man commodified into spiritual kitsch. The state, the clergy, the industry—all stink of corruption and desire. Dhaka itself becomes a character: fetid, baroque, and hysterical, a city where time bends, and morality burns. What might have been mere allegory becomes embodiment. These women, these scenes, these gestures—they don’t represent. They perform. And in their performance, history is queered, patriarchy fractured, and cinema reminded of its revolutionary potential.
Tractatus Bengalium fractures traditional temporality, rejecting the Greenwich logic of modernity for a chronopolitics rooted in South Asian mysticism and Balkan Islamicate curves. Its images loop and rupture, informed by calligraphic motifs and courtyard architectures—fluid, feminine, and perverse. There are no clean lines, no progress bars. This is cinema as spectral procession, as political hallucination.
It is not a story told. It is a system unmade.
In its 189 minutes, Tractatus Bengalium reclaims the cinematic apparatus from within. It queers the frame, bends the timeline, blasphemes the patriarchal order, and offers up an anarchic, lush, confrontational vision of South Asia rarely seen on screen.
It is not content to merely represent the marginalized—it weaponizes them.
If Pasolini had grown up on Bollywood and Gulf War footage, if Godard had shot La Chinoise in Old Dhaka with a pink hijab on the lens—Tractatus Bengalium might be what flickered forth.
Director’s statement
Director’s Statement | Tractatus Bengalium
If Pasolini had grown up on Bollywood and Gulf War footage, if Godard had shot La Chinoise in Old Dhaka with a pink hijab on the lens—Tractatus Bengalium might be what flickered forth.
I shot the film over 28 days in and around Dhaka using three different cameras, employing both handheld and fixed rig setups to generate competing visual languages. I approached the camera not as an objective observer but as a participant—sometimes voyeuristic, often complicit, and always unstable. Inspired by William Friedkin’s concept of the “induced documentary,” I conducted on-camera interviews with thinkers like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—the Columbia professor and first English translator of Jacques Derrida—and Farhad Mazhar, one of the most subversive Islamic-Marxist intellectuals from South Asia. These interviews are not “talking heads” but dramaturgical ruptures, philosophical intrusions into the narrative body of the film.
My cinema is not lamentation—it is contra-cinema. A prelude to anachronous and deviant bodies that produce discourse. Muslim female bodies that do not speak because they are mute, but because they act. Their resistance generates language—not of plot or character, but of rupture. My cinema aims to break apart the tautological body of the director, and with it, the patriarchal body politic.
The scene that critics have called the film’s “abyss” is a 13-minute long-take recounting the brutal gang rape of Mitra, one of the film’s protagonists. It is not shown, but told—recited by the character Rushti in a single breathless monologue that pays homage to Alma’s beach-orgy monologue in Bergman’s Persona (1966). Žižek called that sequence “one of the most erotic moments in cinema.” I took that cue and pushed further—deploying the voice, not the flashback, as the architecture of erotic trauma. The result is something both more violent and more intimate.
Throughout, I borrowed freely from the dissonant formalism of Robbe-Grillet’s L’Immortelle—especially in the editing. Tractatus Bengalium is elliptical, circular, tangential. Behind-the-scenes footage bleeds into archival material; the film-within-the-film is both object and ghost. No distinction remains. The camera breaks its fourth wall so often it forgets where the third one was.
Technically, I was obsessed with the tropics: how the light saturates, how shadows throb, how South Asian skin tones—especially on dark female bodies—absorb and reflect color. We pushed saturation in post, hovering at the edge of magical realism, letting the chroma dictate emotionality. My reference palette included Almodóvar, Martel’s La Ciénaga, and Fanny and Alexander, but from a colonial tropic’s angle. In this chromatic heat, time itself bends—rejecting the cold precision of Greenwich Mean Time. What I call “chronopolitics.”
I interpret traditional South Asian and Islamic forms—calligraphic curves, courtyard geometries—not as ornamental heritage, but as narrative structure. The story spirals, doubles back, refracts—like the storytelling in 1001 Nights. The bodies of my women characters—Mitra and Rushti—are not vessels of trauma or symbols of nationhood; they are mobile, anachronous, electric.
In that sense, the film resonates with the ethos of both Locarno and Venice: cinema as a site of risk, rupture, and resistance. It belongs to a lineage that includes Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, but viewed through the humid diffraction of the Third World. Tractatus Bengalium is not a film—it is a cinematic premonition. A fevered manifesto in brown flesh and tropical light.
—Ebadur Rahman
Director, Tractatus Bengalium
