Long before a plant carries flowers, it carries the weight of expectation. From seed to bloom, a quiet anticipation rests between its leaves. Eventually, when the flowering happens, scrutiny follows. You’re probably sensing this isn’t really about flowers, or plants—but about something else entirely. You’d be right.
This is a layer of the metaphor carried through Soumyajit Ghosh Dastidar’s Flowering Man. The film, an experimental short made as part of their degree at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, won Best Non-Feature Film at the 71st National Awards in August this year. It tells the story of Shashi (Rajeev Gaursingh)—a man undergoing a transformation. The narrative happens through the lens of his unnamed daughter (Tanisha Meesala) in an asynchronous, dreamlike style.
Watching the film feels like reading the teenage daughter’s diary—where metaphors and anecdotes shuttle between places and memories. “For me, I’m trying to queer the cinematic language itself. How what is unconventional is inherently queered in some way,” says Dastidar. “ I was inspired by the lore we grow up hearing—the one where they tell you not to swallow the seeds of an orange, or a plant would grow inside you.” The plant inside Shashi is his queerness, and while there isn’t one inside his daughter, she is also learning to bloom with acceptance for her father’s changing identity.
The film represents these imaginations with production design and soundscapes that feel haunting, yet familiar. You see colourful drapes, golden, rolling hills, and teeming fishbowls in the background. The sounds include harmonicas, water swishing around, and eerie melodies blended with the calls of various animals. Even through the experimentation, the soundtrack manages to convey the film’s central narrative with ease.
Young Shashi is a creative child. He thinks clouds are made of sounds, and every time he makes a cloud, he sends it off into the skies with innocence. When we see him, with a literal flowering plant growing out of his mouth, he seems at peace—even as he prunes it. His daughter, on the other hand, tells her friend her father is dead when she’s asked about him. Even as she narrates this incident, in her mind, she’s on a hill, next to her father, swathed in his sweater, caressing his hand. You can’t villainise her for grappling with her father’s transformation; instead, you are empathetic to her loss. Dastidar directs these characters with a delicate finesse, and performances by Meesala and Gaursingh are impactful too.
But the film wasn’t always supposed to feature this father-daughter relationship. Flowering Man was initially written as a body horror movie—where a middle-aged school teacher in Pune suddenly sprouts a tree out of his mouth. But the thought of him having a daughter instead gave Soumyajit the film’s narrative as it stands today. The transformation of a queer person in cinema has been frequently documented, but the focus on the struggles people around us undergo, even if they do love us, is a rare occurrence.
“I think we’re used to watching queer stories in a certain way. There is always a flattening of characters. There are no flaws or dimensions. We are always shown as something rebuked by society or seeking acceptance. But to me, the relationship between a father and daughter is so sacrosanct. In the mind of the daughter, in many ways, the father forms the image of a man. I’ve watched the dynamics of it between my sister and father—so it was interesting to me to imagine queerness breaking that image too,” says Soumyajit.
Does the answer to the stagnation that we are facing in Indian cinema lie in such boundary-breaking grammar? Even if we are telling stories about coming out, or narratives of queerness that we have seen in many films, can their treatment be the way we push the needle of our collective imagination? I think of cinema then as a queer form in itself. Its rigid formulas, tropes, and genres can restrict the full expansiveness of queer expression.
“As a language, cinema is always evolving. I think we shouldn’t gender the arena of cinema as queer or not—but look at cinema as a larger entity. The moment you are referring to something as queer cinema, you’re already gendering it. Cinema can be a means to find larger acceptance in society, but just the identity of a person can’t be the basis of a film,” echoes Dastidar.
In treating Flowering Man like an archive of memory, Dastidar transcends traditional narrative structures that mainstream cinema is plagued by. If you think about it, there is a way to tell this story like a stereotypical hero’s journey. The elements in the film would very much lend themselves to that template, but instead, it subverts that trope by treating the known and unknown worlds as permeable. Instead of treating the daughter like an ancillary plot point to Shashi’s struggle, Flowering Man gives her and Shashi an arc that stands as an example for storytelling that still resonates.
Audiences don’t need to be spoonfed, and films can become a channel for makers and audiences to move through each other’s experiences—even if vastly different. Dastidar narrates this connection as well. “Through making this film, I definitely feel more connected to the lore I grew up hearing. My childhood memories of my grandmother, my mother, my aunt—sitting around in the winter afternoon inspire my writing. Their interest in cinema has also somehow come through me.”
Since Flowering Man is a student film, it is currently not available to watch publicly, unless FTII uploads it to their YouTube channel, or there are shows at a film festival programming. Soumyajit is happy to provide it for private screenings/collectives when requested. As for his next project, he is taking it slow but tinkering with various concepts—including a ghost romance feature and another story set in Durgapur, West Bengal, where he’s from.