Shown at this year’s Busan International Film Festival, Tribeny Rai’s debut feature, Shape of Momo, is a wonderful piece of writing. A powerful film that listens closely to the hidden struggles of women living within the limits of tradition.

The narrative centres on Bishnu, a 32-year-old who abandons her city job and returns to her ancestral Himalayan village. What might have been a simple homecoming becomes a portrait of conflicting expectations. Bishnu is greeted by three generations of women whose hopes and anxieties reflect the pressures of the larger community: a grandmother waiting for her son’s return from Dubai, a mother eager to see Bishnu married, and a younger sister, Junu, pregnant and seeking refuge from a tense marriage. These converging lives form a web of love and duty that is as suffocating as it is sustaining. Rai draws on her own upbringing in Sikkim, recalling a household where women ate only after the men had finished, and where her grandfather’s belief in male superiority created the rhythm of family life.

The women in Shape on Mono are complex, contradictory individuals who, at the same time, uphold and resist the traditions that bind them. Bishnu’s mother, for instance, personifies the paradox of a generation that has endured patriarchal strictures yet measures her daughter’s success through marriage. Junu, meanwhile, arrives as both a cautionary tale and a rebel, having fled a marriage that reflects the very expectations her family cherishes.

One cannot forget those momos, small steamed dumplings beloved across Nepal and Tibet. In the film’s kitchen scenes, the act of shaping and filling momo brings the continuity of family life: it is a comfort food that gathers people around the table, a taste of home that carries memory and everyday sustenance. The sharing of momo proves how tradition can nourish even as it confines, a symbol for the women’s entanglement with culture and custom.

Bishnu’s relationship with Gyan, a local architect, who seems to be a suitable man for the young woman, further complicates the narrative. However, rather than providing a romantic escape, it exposes how even affection can be freighted with social expectations. Their interactions are less about romance than about finding common ground, a test of whether love can exist outside the strictures of duty.

Rai watches her characters closely and with care, showing how oppression can exist alongside affection, and how love can be mixed with control. Her women are neither martyrs nor heroines; they are, instead, fully human. I love how Shape of Momo captures the minute, daily discussions through which women claim space for themselves – whether by delaying marriage, refusing to eat last, or simply insisting on the validity of their own desires.

Shape of Momo honours women whose strength changes the world in subtle but meaningful ways.

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image courtesy of Dalley Khorsani Productions

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