Sanjivani, a young woman from a rural area in the state of Maharashtra in central India, is a loving and tender mother. After her husband’s suicide, she lives with her brother-in-law who makes her work in the fields. She is now solely responsible for her two kids, faced with a mountain of debt left by her husband and the structures of a patriarchal society that incapacitates and renders invisible widows like her. It is only when she joins a group of women who suffered similar fates that she slowly gains some self-confidence. She is not alone with her despair and grief – the suicide rate among peasants who took their lives in the face of crop failures and dumping prices on the globalised market is harrowing: 400,000 in the last twenty years.
Kinshuk Surjan not only observes people and circumstances with compassion; he also stands for a cinema that makes a difference. The women’s group he follows here only came together as a result of his film project. In impressive images and with great empathy for the protagonists he portrays, he not only succeeds in producing a careful representation of highly complex contexts, but also a truly documentary intervention into unacceptable conditions – with the aim of improving them.

On a moonless night, a cheeky bull escapes from his herd. He dashes through fields and over hills until he finally stops at a pond, where a piece of paper on which a poem is emerging attaches itself to him. The bull shakes off the paper and sneaks into town, where he watches people at their nocturnal business. He witnesses a police investigation, listens in on two truck drivers and observes the theft of a bus stop shelter. All these experiences are accompanied by the narrator’s poetic comments and culminate in a hilarious singing sequence, complete with a dance and performance number by the bull.

Meanwhile, the people in the town are in an uproar about the undetectable moon. They search, discuss and protest. But the moon stays missing – until the bull transforms himself at the end of his journey.