The images in Chasing the Rainbow began as casual experiments with a mobile phone camera—gifted to me by my parents, who were 2,641.7 kilometers away in Shillong—while I was a student at the Film and Television Institute of India. I wasn’t filming with the intention of making a film. I was simply documenting the everyday: the rhythm of campus life, my room, shifting moods, friends caught in passing light. These moments felt quiet but meaningful—though at the time, the images themselves felt minor, even disposable.
Later, when Reena approached me with the idea of "A Room of Our Own," I returned to an old hard drive and began sifting through these fragments. What I found wasn’t narrative, but feeling—snapshots of a time when everything was shifting.
At the heart of the film is a new love, slowly taking shape through SMS and Google Chat exchanges. These private conversations—filled with hesitation, humour, and longing—carry the texture of something tentative and intimate, just beginning to unfold. At the same time, there was an unfamiliar sense of alienation while being back home with my parents—close in proximity, yet distant in feeling. Alongside all this was the comfort of friendships, and then, the sharp rupture of a friend’s sudden passing. Grief enters, without structure, and the film shifts with it. These moments live together in the film as they did in life: without clear transitions, without resolution.
The film is made from images not meant for the screen. They’re raw, sometimes blurry, often accidental—but they carry honesty. I became interested in what it means to frame memory, to revisit something unpolished and ask it to speak again. The politics of the image—who is seen, how intimacy is captured—was always present.
Chasing the Rainbow is a personal film, but it speaks to something shared: the desire to hold on to the fleeting, to make sense of change, to honour what’s lost and what’s just beginning. It’s about looking back—not to explain, but to feel again.