Meet Dominic Sangma, a Meghalaya-based filmmaker whose film attained international recognition recently
It’s a rags-to-riches story, but definitely carries its own sparkly touch. This is a story of a boy who fell in love with writing and telling stories on the very night he saw his first feature film. Even as a teenager, Dominic Sangma never thought of making a film, forget international recognition. However, fate kept bringing him closer to his purpose, and looked what happened! He became the first Indian film maker to have his film selected at La Fabrique Cinéma.
Hailing from Meghalaya’s Garo Hills, Dominic Sangma’s journey started from a remote village and finds a big opportunity at the Festival de Cannes, 2019 after his second feature film ‘Rapture’ got selected for La Fabrique Cinéma, a programme organized by the Institut Français for this year’s Festival de Cannes. The highlight of this selection is that it is the one and only film picked from India. It was one of the top ten projects selected from all over the world to be a part of the festival.
La Fabrique Cinema isn’t a film festival. It is an interactive platform for directors, funders and producers. This festival invites films from all over the world; films that are worth investing money into.
Rapture is a film that revolves around people who suddenly disappear from Meghalaya, and people’s reactions to the incident. Yes, you got that right. The film is inclined towards extremism in India that brewed in Meghalaya around the beginning of 2000. However, Sangma has neither accepted nor denied anything about the said extremism in the film.
Luckily, Sangma had already found the producer for his film, even before it was selected for the prestigious event.
“A few years ago, my diploma film was chosen for a contest during a film festival at Beijing Film Academy. She was a student there and liked my film. She was interested in putting money in my next project if it had good content,” Mr. Sangma told a source.
Beijing-based Xu Jianshang became the producer of the film, after she fell in love with the script.
Dominic is the first film-maker from Meghalaya, and like every child, he was also confused about choosing his career. Even though he comes from a family of ‘oral storytellers,’ Sangma was always advised by his peers to pursue simpler life.
“With no access to electricity in my village, it wasn’t until I was 10 years old when I first came across a television. The first time I saw a film was when one night, a rich family in the village hired a television and screened a film. Growing up, I loved writing and telling stories, although even as a teenager I never thought that one day I’d make a film,’ he told a source.
Sangma was in high school when he reached at the pinnacle of frustration with conventional methods of studying. He reached out to his elder brother for advice, and was suggested him to study something else since filmmaking was not easy to pursue.
So, Sangma graduated in Economics. But what’s written in your destiny cannot be taken away. In 2008, he finally got accepted in Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute’ and aspired to become a Bollywood director. However, studying in SRFT completely changed his perspective of filmmaking.
“The kind of films I saw at the institute completely changed my perspective on the possibilities of cinema, the art form itself, and how it can influence our life, and the way we look at it. That’s when my love for cinema grew, and my understanding of film completely changed. It also changed my mind about going to Bombay. Instead, I wanted to go back home and tell my stories,” he told a source.
Dominc loves observing people, little things about them, their behavior, everything. His films portray what people normally miss in life.
His first feature film, Ma.Ama, was featured in the prestigious Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI) Mumbai Festival last year. The movie came from the deepest space of Sangma’s heart. The film featured his own father, Philip, and won various awards in India as well as abroad.
As an independent filmmaker, Sangma only aims to portray his truth through his stories without fearing any judgments
