Caged Lives, Vanishing Wings

Pinjar literally means “cage.” But the word can be expanded to mean more than a cage. In Rudrajit Roy’s debut film, the title refers both to birds, the bird-catcher and to other characters held captive in the larger and invisible cage called Life.

“Pinjar is about captivity in its visible and invisible forms. It asks whether freedom is an external condition or an internal awakening. It does not provide solutions. It observes, reflects, and invites the audience to confront their own cages,” says Roy.

Pinjar is the director’s response to cages - literal and invisible - we construct around others and ourselves adhering to societal templates. The story mirrors a bird torn from its forest, struggling to survive in captivity. Like that bird, Jhimli, Paromita, Shefali, Tarak, and Iqbal are all ensnared by patriarchy, poverty, grief, and violence.

“Their struggles reflect the quiet tragedies we normalize, naming it as resilience. This film is a protest against that normalization—a resistance to cruelty, silence, and systemic oppression. But it’s also a soft, urgent plea for compassion, for liberation, and celebration of individuality.”

The film opens with a stark warning on the global decline of bird populations, tracing it to the widespread poaching and caging that have driven many species towards extinction.

Tarak (Sagnik Mukherjee) is a bird-catcher who is very poor with a growing girl Jhimli to take care of, her mother having died at child-birth. He belongs to a low caste and finds it difficult to eke out a bare living because there is a severe depletion of birds in his village. The camera focuses and closes in on some birds like the Asian fairy blue bird, the yellow bird, the black bulbul, the Darjeeling woodpecker, the white-rumped shama, the streaked spider-hunter, the zebra finch and the blue-winged laughing thrush. “These birds are familiar in the Indian sub-continent which makes their disappearance quite disturbing. The idea was to show that loss often begins quietly,” says Roy.

Jhimli (Swastidipa Das) cannot cope with the cruelty of capturing birds but helps her father as much as she can. Poverty keeps her away from school but she keeps tracing alphabets and letters on the floor with a stick. Tarak doubles up as a pseudo priest to earn some extra money which is wrong as he is not a Brahmin and neither does he know the rituals that go into Hindu poojas and prayers. He has a Muslim friend Iqbal (Ishan Mazumder) who helps him eke out a living. Soon, he too is trapped in his profession because of his faith. Paromita (Satakshi Nandy) is young and attractive widow who ekes out a bare living by cooking for the children in a local school.

A completely different track narrates the story of an urban, beautiful, working wife and mother Shefali (Mallika Banerjee), a sad victim of domestic violence. This track has no connect with the main story and sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise beautiful painting. One wonders why a smoking, drinking and working wife with a boyfriend is so quiet about the domestic abuse and quits her husband and home when the husband is unwell. It does not make sense. Pinjar would have been a beautiful film if this track did not exist.

Pinjar has been screened at around nine national and international film festivals. Sagnik Mukherjee as Tarak and Swastidipa Das as Jhimli are brilliant. Manas Bhattacharyya’s cinematography captures the beauty of Nature as eloquently as it catches the pained expressions on the faces of Tarak, Jhimli, Iqbal and Shefali. Ratul Shankar’s background score and songs are beautiful including the soundtrack filled with the chirping of birds, the unending circular staircase a tired Shefali climbing slowly back to a home which was never hers, are beautiful.

The film was shot in rural Bengal and parts of urban Kolkata, including residential high-rise interiors and Jharkhand. A wild life cinematographer shot the birds and recorded their exact sounds for a span of 18 months in India and Nepal.

Asked what defines the trigger for a film beginning with caged birds, Roy says, “The image of a bird struggling inside a small bamboo cage stayed with me for years. It raised a simple but haunting question: who is truly trapped — the bird, or the man who traps it? From that question, the story gradually expanded into a meditation on captivity.”

(The writer is an award-winning film scholar.)