Land Of My Dreams [2023]

 Nausheen Khan’s debut feature-length documentary essay Land of My Dreams was simultaneously expansive and intimate, joyous and elegiac, political and personal, and was situated at the intersectionality of religious agency, feminist expression and political activism. As a protest film by a young and courageous woman filmmaker, where resistance is tampered with quiet melancholy, it reminded me of Payal Kapadia’s magnificent essay film A Night of Knowing Nothing, while the rousing 2025 docu The Encampments – committed, amateur, extended, on-field reportage on the spontaneous birth and spread of a collective movement underpinned by peaceful public dissent, and its brutal crushing by repressive state apparatus – reminded me to once again attempt getting access to this film (having tried and failed previously). The Jamia Millia Islamia university alumnus decided to grab her camera and head for her alma mater in Delhi when its students fearlessly raised their voice against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the violent crackdown they faced at the hands of right-wing lumpen and complicit cops. That organically catalysed the historic Shaheen Bagh protests – a valiant, peaceful, multifaith sit-in that was spearheaded by women – and the filmmaker jumped right in to participate, archive and resist in solidarity. Alongside extensively recording the vitality, camaraderie, warmth, generosity, defiance and rousing sense of community that was on display, and the chilling ruthlessness with which it was dismantled and criminalized, she also leveraged this canvas for private meditations on her identity as a Muslim woman, her fading hopes for a pluralist society, and the collapse of her land of dreams. The film, therefore, was as much an act of bearing witness and a refusal to forget, as a personal confessional and a journalistic diary.

Director: Nausheen Khan

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Reportage/Protest Film

Language: English/Hindi

Country: India