Shilpika Bordoloi’s short film is a tribute to Mizo Culture

The saying that the smallest pebble can cause the greatest ripples finds resonance in Shilpika Bordoloi’s short film Mau: The Spirit Dreams of Cheraw, which has won the National Award for the Best Debut Film of a Director in the Non-Feature Films category this year. In Delhi recently for a public screening, Shilpika says the eight-minute film is a “re-imagination of two parallel memories”. One is the remembered and traumatic history of Mautam, the ecological famine caused in Mizoram due to the flowering of bamboo. “This was the inspiration behind choosing to tell a bamboo-human story.” The other story, she shares, is the forgotten intergenerational memory of the spirit that drives the Cheraw or the bamboo dance. This is the story told in the film.

“Following the death a woman during childbirth, her spirit, longing for her baby, becomes restless. It is then that the community gathers to perform the Cheraw dance — a ritual that soothes her spirit and helps it transition,” explains Shilpika, the founder of Brahmaputra Cultural Foundation, which seeks to preserve and promote the traditions of the North East.

Working with a small team and relying solely on natural light, she has adopted a “visual anthropological approach,” where the camera, along with the performer, becomes a participant in storytelling rather than being a distant observer.

Shilpika is a versatile performing artiste, who counts masters of different forms, such as Rathindra Sinha, Darshana Jhaveri, Indira PP Bora, Leela Samson and Rashid Ansari, as her gurus. “Even stillness is a state of motion. Movement has existed in all events of indigenous life. I feel stories that not narrated are valuable too. They are shared through movement, silence, breath and the ecological intelligence of the land.”

Reflecting on the origins of bamboo dance, Shilpika points out that across cultures, dances of mourning have existed — where movements help spirits transition into the afterlife.

What has changed over time, Shilpika says, is the establishment of the living human as a superior being. “There is no longer mourning at the death of a tree or any non-human. Today, our actions have taken us far away from the land and everything that is intrinsic to it.”

The film’s symbolism is striking, especially in its visual portrayal of the embryo and the mother. For Shilpika, the motif of birth and death is central. “I choreographed movements around birthing, frantic separation, and pacification to depict the spirit’s transition — mirroring the demise of the bamboo during Mautam,” she explains.”

In Mizo, ‘Mau’ means bamboo, and the Mautak species is known to flower just once every 40 years —dying immediately after it blooms. Shilpika finds this deeply poetic, drawing a metaphorical parallel to the death of a mother during childbirth. She also notes that the Mautak bamboo played a pivotal role in the formation of Mizoram as a state.

A recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puruskar for Experimental/ Contemporary Dance, Shilpika says the filmmaking journey was a leap of faith at many levels and sees the process as an extension of her art practice. “In films, I have found an integration of the performer, choreographer, cinematographer, visual designer, writer, dreamer, and anthropologist in me. I am in love with how much this medium allows me to integrate.”