Mollika
2025 · 8m · India
Directed by Pratyusha Gupta, Mythili Prakash
Genres: documentary, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Three generations of women — dancer, teacher-mother, daughter — reflect on time and lineage through the dancing body.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Three generations of women dancing through time sounds like it could be a greeting-card meditation, but Gupta and Prakash seem genuinely interested in what the body *refuses* to say—there's a contrarian intelligence here that resists the easy sentimentality of intergenerational lineage, even if the premise itself reads safe.
A deliberate essay film that situates itself squarely in the documentary-performance tradition, with the formal rigor to let dance language do the archival work—the curation of what gets shown across three bodies, three temporalities, feels considered and historically aware in a way that will reward close viewing.
The decision to let the dancing itself carry the theoretical weight, rather than voiceover or exposition, is what makes this work—that commitment to showing rather than explaining is where the filmmaking choice becomes singular, turning what could be a family video into something that trusts the viewer's eye completely.