A feminist science fiction story

"Sultana's Dream by Rokeya Hossain fell into my hands when I was sheltering from the rain in a bookshop in Ahmedabad. I knew immediately that this was the next film I wanted to make". This is how Spanish Director and Script Writer Isabel Herguera describes her first encounter with "Sultana's Dream", a feminist science fiction story written in Bengal in 1905 in which the women are in charge. Around eight years later, Herguera brings her very own version of the story to the big screen as an animated film. More than 100 people, 75 per cent of them women, worked on the realisation of the international co-production - including the Hamburg-based animation studio Fabian&Fred.

"I met Isabel at a showcase organised by AG Animationsfilm in Cologne after seeing her project teaser online," says Executive Producer Fabian Driehorst. They stayed in touch - and after the actual co-production partner from Germany left the project, Driehorst stepped in with his company in 2020. "I still found the project exciting and wanted to give it a chance. However, as the film was already in production, we couldn't apply for production funding anywhere and had to come in with a huge amount of our own money. So it was a very arduous journey," reveals Driehorst. Financial support first came from ARTE and then post-production funding from the MOIN Film Fund. Music, sound and mixing were created in the Hanseatic city by Zeigermann Audio, while colour correction took place at Optical Arts.

Anyone watching the finished film some three years later can only imagine how much work and attention to detail went into the feature-length film. The biggest challenge: preserving the original atmosphere of the story without distorting it with a westernised look. "At the time, we came up with the idea that the story should centre around Inés: a young Spanish artist, a little lost, without passions or long-term goals. After discovering the book, she decides to take a trip to India in search of the traces of the Script Writer of Sultana's Dream," says filmmaker Herguera about the content. Parallels to her own life are unmistakable: Herguera herself spent 12 years in India and also followed the route of Script Writer Rokeya Hossain after discovering the story.

The team used three different animation techniques to realise Iné's journey visually. A large part of the story (Iné's journey in the present) was created using classic 2D animation. "The backgrounds were painted entirely with watercolours, while the characters were animated digitally," reveals Fabian Driehorst.

The silhouette technique was used in the sequences about the life of Rokeya Hossain in early 20th century India. For this technique, Isabel Herguera worked together with artists from Bengal who specialise in the construction of shadow theatre puppets. The animation of the cut-out figures takes place directly under the camera on a multi-plane. The backgrounds are hand-painted on tissue paper and lit from behind.

The third animation technique is used in the part of the film dedicated to the utopian Ladyland - the actual story behind "Sultana's Dream, in which women have the power and men have to stay at home and take care of the housework. For the "Mehndi style", Herguera's team collaborated with female henna tattoo artists. The use of this style seemed to be the best possible homage to Rokeya Hossain: Only women are allowed to wear the temporary mehndi tattoo - it is traditionally associated with weddings or festivals and symbolises femininity more than anything else.