Sultana's Dream
Narrative Feature
Basque, Spanish, English, Italian, Hindi, Bengali
mins
83
US Premiere
In-Person, Virtual
2023
Spain, Germany, India
Fantasy, Animation, Drama
Inés, a Spanish artist, lives in India and stumbles upon Sultana's Dream a science fiction story written by Rokeya Hossain in 1905. It describes Ladyland, a utopia in which women rule the country while men live in seclusion and are responsible for household chores. Fascinated by the story Inés embarks on a journey across the country to search for the one place where women can live in peace.
World Premiere - San Sebastián International Film Festival, Spain
Screens with So, That Happened & A Road Not Taken
Director, Producer
Isabel Herguera
Isabel Herguera is a Spanish animation film director with an international background. She studied fine arts at the Universidad del País Vasco and continued her studies at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf. She later earned a master's degree from Calarts in Los Angeles, where she directed Los Muertitos (1993), an animated short about the wall separating Mexico and the United States. In 1997 she founded her own studio Loko Pictures (1996-2004), with which she produced numerous commercials and her animated short The Balloon (2003). In 2003, Isabel returned to Europe, where she became director of Animac, the Catalonia International Animated Film Festival (2003-12) and coordinator of the Laboratorio de imágen en movimiento at Arteleku in San Sebastian (2003-14). She directed various animated short films that won awards and were nominated for the Goya Prize. Isabel has been a professor at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, since 2005, at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing since 2012 and has been a professor in the animation department at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne since 2017. She has held workshops on animation in many places around the world such as Ethiopia, China, Cuba, Australia, Korea, Colombia, Mexico and Italy, although this is the place where she has most recently developed her work, in India, which gave rise to the Sultana's Dream project, is her first feature film.
Director:
Isabel Herguera
Producer:
Isabel Herguera, Chelo Loureiro, Mariano Baratech, Fabian Driehorst, Iván Miñambres
Writer:
Isabel Herguera, Gianmarco Serra
Cast:
Miren Arrieta, Dedjani Mukherjee, Miren Gabilondo, Nausheen Javeed, Ranjitha Rajeevan, Mary Beard, Paul Preciado, Roberto Bessi, Manu Khurana
Editor:
Gianmacro Serra
Crew:
Eduardo Elosegi, Gianmacro Serra, Simon Bastian