Online May 2 - 4
Photo courtesy: Film Heritage Foundation
Indie Meme Special 10th Year
Retrospective Showcase
Land of Dreams
USA, India | Documentary
2025 | 40 mins | Punjabi,Hindi,English
Limited tickets available on site.
Filmed for nearly a decade, Land of Dreams is an intimate portrait of Virender Rana, a taxi driver from India, chasing his dream of telling his story in America. While he points the camera at his own life and films a Bollywood style movie, the film follows his journey of coming to America, finding joy as part of a larger Sikh community and that of taxi drivers and laying roots as an immigrant. As he joins the elite Uber Black fleet hoping for his dreams to come true, he faces challenges of being a brown immigrant on the streets of post 9/11 America. Land of Dreams is a letter of
solidarity and hope to anyone who has searched for a home and a land for their dreams in a place where they were not born.
Film Heritage Foundation used the best surviving elements for the restoration – the original camera negative and the 35 mm print preserved at the NFDC – NFAI. Unfortunately, the sound negative was not available. We digitized the sound from the 35 mm print preserved at Film Heritage Foundation. The film elements were repaired by the Film Heritage Foundation conservators and the scanning was done in Prasad Lab in Chennai We found that due to the deterioration of the print, there were vertical green lines on many parts of the film. While the scanning and digital clean-up was done at Prasad under the supervision of L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, the grading, sound restoration and mastering was done at the lab in Bologna. Both Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani, the cinematographer of the film, have been involved in the restoration of the film.
Restoration Process
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Photo courtesy: Film Heritage Foundation
The screening will be preceded by a performance by Specific Thing.
Specific Thing is the project of local musician Román. Sometimes he plays by himself and sometimes he plays with his snazzy band — he loves to do both! And the music? It draws from folk, punk, pop, latin, communism, animals, friends... He likes to keep it cartoony, quick, and catchy. The band released an album in 2025 called "Now Is Actually Not A Good Time". Find more at @specificthing on Instagram.
Meet Specific Thing
About the Artist
Photo courtesy:
Film Heritage Foundation
Ambarien Alqadar is a filmmaker, screen writer and a first generation immigrant. Shaped by the experience of growing up in Jamia Nagar, New Delhi, the metaphor of border crossing is central to her creative practice as she works between documentary, narrative and experimental forms.
Her first documentary- Who Can Speak of Men? was acclaimed as a "revolutionary for its portrayal of Indian Muslim women" at BFI Flare and selected to several prominent festivals. Four Women and a Room and The Ghetto Girl are experimental video essays exploring intersections of history, embodied experience and memory. Currently she is working on Stray Girls- a short narrative presented by Anurag Kashyap and her first feature narrative- Nisa (WOMAN).
Ambarien is an alum of Jamia Millia Islamia, India and Temple University U.S. where she was a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow. She was a speaker at the International Documentary Association 2020, Decolonizing the Documentary and Rising Beyond the Ceiling: 100 stereotypes shattering Muslim women from India in the United States (Film & Media Arts). She lives between New Delhi and Chicago where she teaches at School of Cinematic Arts, DePaul University.
Photo courtesy: Film Heritage Foundation
Trailer
Credits
Restoration Effort Led By: Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Director, Film Heritage Foundation
Restoration Credit:
Restored by Film Heritage Foundation in association with Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd.(Amul), the cinematographer Govind Nihalani and the director Shyam Benegal. Funding supported by Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd.(Amul)