Bulbul Can Sing
Bulbul Can Sing is a visceral coming-of-age drama about a young girl living in rural India, fighting her way through love and loss as she figures out who she really is.
Bulbul is an exuberant young woman, most happy when she’s hanging out in the fields with her friends Bonny and Sumu. As these three teenagers, two girls and a boy, begin to define their own identities, they find themselves increasingly clashing with the age-old rules set down by the village. Bulbul is attracted to a boy for the first time, but her mother advises that ‘Girls should be modest. Girls should behave well.’ Sumu is bullied for not conforming to what his peers expect of a young man. For Bonny, the pressures of the community become unbearable.
Das recounts her story in the pure language of cinema. The camera finds moments – in a music class, by a lake, or on the landscape of Bulbul’s face – that suddenly illuminate this girl’s coming to womanhood and self-awareness. A villager’s stray remark compresses centuries of tradition and offers guidance to Bulbul, but also constraint. And as she learns to walk with both love and death in her life, countless variations of natural light give her whole world an immersive glow. (source: www.tiff.net)