Sultana’s Dream

(El sueño de la Sultana)

Isabel Herguera / Spain, Germany / 2023 / 87 min
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  • Celtic Media Awards

    Best Animation

  • Quirino Awards

    Best Visual Development

  • San Sebastián Int'l Film Festival

    Best Basque Film Award

  • Feroz Awards (Film Critics Association)

    Nomination Best Animation

  • European Academy Awards

    Nomination Best Animation

  • Annecy Int'l Animated Film Festival

    Grand Prix

  • Guadalajara Int'l Film Festival

  • Göteborg Film Festival

  • Tokyo Int'l Film Festival

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Spanish, English, Basque, with English subtitles

With Miren Arrieta, Dedjani Mukherjee, Miren Gabilondo

Why will your students love Sultana’s Dream? This multi-award-winning film, a work of poetic storytelling and outstanding animation, poses a thought-provoking question: What if women held all the political power? Imagine a “Planet of the Apes” based on gender, where roles are reversed, and men are confined to the home while women lead in a technologically advanced future. It’s essential viewing!

Inés is a 30-year-old Spanish animation director who travels to India, initially to end her relationship with her Indian lover, Amar. During her visit, Inés stumbles upon a bookstore where she discovers “Sultana’s Dream,” a groundbreaking feminist science fiction story written in 1905 by Begum Rokeya Hossain, a Muslim feminist, writer, and political activist from Bengal.

Fascinated by Hossain’s visionary tale of Ladyland, a utopian society where women scientists rule and men are confined to domestic roles, Inés becomes inspired to create a film that parallels her journey with that of Rokeya Hossain.

As she embarks on a transformative voyage across India, Inés explores the life and legacy of Hossain while searching for traces of the fictional Ladyland.

The film employs different animation techniques to depict Inés’s personal story, Rokeya Hossain’s life, and the imaginary Ladyland, creating a visually rich and thought-provoking narrative that explores themes of feminism, cultural identity, and personal growth.

Press

“Magnificent and highly stylised visuals, conceived by Herguera as a way of not ‘westernising’ the story too much. This is not a film for those seeking accurate representations of real life, while the decision to use three animation techniques depending on the subject matter at the time is high risk and might threaten to break up the visual flow – but it succeeds, and there is a joy in simply watching such high-level craftsmanship unfold.” – Jonathan Holland, ScreenDaily

“This depth that Sultana’s Dream addresses is interesting and important, and has a beautiful and considerable didactic value, but what shines the most is the form. The film distinguishes itself in the way Herguera and her team tell this story of domination and transformation. With wit and a certain ironic humour, through original and fascinating visual and sound materials, symbolic colours, images, music and sounds that evoke the depth of the film, they recreate the dreamlike world of Begum Rokeya’s story and build a whole imaginary full of new ideas, spaces, landscapes and characters. ” – Julia Olmo, Cineuropa

“Call it utopian sci fi, or the fertile cross-pollination of women thinkers across time and space, but Sultana’s Dream takes the audience on a fantasy journey that is as delightful as it is educational.” – Deborah Young, The Film Verdict

About the Director
Isabel Herguera, born in San Sebastian in 1961, is a Spanish animation filmmaker with a rich international background. She pursued Fine Arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany and specialized in Animation at the renowned California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

From 1990 to 2003 she lived in Los Angeles, where she worked as an animator for Acme Filmworks, Klasky Szupo, and for directors such as Maureen Selwood, Raimund Krumme, and Sue Laughlin or Paul Vester.

Isabel worked on music videos, among others All Around the World by Oasis (1997) or Sting’s interactive CD-ROM All This Time (1996).

In 1996, she founded Loko Pictures, an animation studio where she produced and directed work for clients such as Philip Morris, FOX, Proctor and Gamble, and HBO.

In 2003 she returned to Europe and was the Festival Director of Animac, the International Animated Film Festival of Catalonia, and coordinated the moving image laboratory at Arteleku in San Sebastian. During these years she made several short films such as La gallina ciega (2005), Ámár (2010); Bajo la Almohada (2012); Amore d’inverno (2014) Kutxa beltza (2016) and produced Berbaoc (2007) and Sailor’s Grave (2014).

Today Isabel is a professor of experimental animation at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in India (since 2005) as well as a visiting professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (since 2012).

Sultana’s Dream is Isabel’s first full-length film. Her artistic path is based on creating connections between Spain and the world and promoting collaboration between local and global actors.

Notes on Film

“Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Hossain fell into my hands by chance while I was sheltering from the rain in a bookstore in India. I knew immediately that this was the next film I wanted to make. But how could I approach it? How could I maintain the original character of the story, full of nuances and references to the reality of Bengal in the early twentieth century, without betraying it with a Western look?

This is when we came up with the idea of the main character Inés: a young Spanish contemporary artist, a little lost in the world, without much passion or long-term goals, who is fascinated by the book and decides to travel to India searching for traces of the author and Ladyland itself.

Sultana’s Dream is a film that comes from the heart and is inspired by the desire to honor an audience looking for a place in cinema that offers a personal and alternative vision of the world.”

– Isabel Herguera, Director

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