Prastabana – The Preamble (2025), directed by Dilip Bora and Manik Roy, is a film that seeks to foreground justice, equality, and the spirit of constitutional rights in India, but does so without the necessary ingredients of impactful filmmaking. There are two narratives at play. One follows a research scholar who is on a field visit with her guide, Professor Islam (Tapan Das), to the char regions of Assam, where they explore the lived realities of various communities residing in villages near the Indo–Bangladesh border. The second narrative revolves around student politics on the campus of a higher educational institution.
Parvi Barua plays the research scholar Ambalika, who is learning about the history, linguistic heterogeneity, and socio-economic realities of the people living near the border. Her encounters with the inhabitants are structured primarily as dialogic exchanges that inform the audience through a series of question-and-answer sessions. Through these interviews, the film captures the everyday concerns of the people—from modes of schooling and the use of mother tongue to the continued manifestations of the effects of Partition. It includes stories of land loss, familial separation, and intergenerational trauma.
The structure of the film reflects a trend in contemporary Assamese cinema where filmmakers place a research scholar at the centre of the narrative to facilitate the exposition of issues. One may recall films like Parthajit Baruah’s The Nellie Story (Nellier Kotha, 2023), in which a scholar visits the site of the 1983 massacre to understand underrepresented personal histories of violence. Likewise, Rajni Basumatary’s Gorai Phakhri (Wild Swans, 2023), a Bodo-language film featuring an all-female cast, situates a scholar in a borderland village to explore women’s narratives and experiences in the context of culture.
Similarly, in Manju Borah’s Seuj Sandhan (In Search of Green, 2024), the narrative is framed through the perspective of a researcher-filmmaker whose engagement with the rural population exposes the contradictions of environmental conservation and development agendas. Dilip Bora, who is credited as writer (and director) of Prastabana – The Preamble, also wrote the script for Seuj Sandhan. Bidyut Kotoky’s Ekhon Nedekha Nodir Xipare (As the River Flows, 2012) and Manju Borah’s Akashitorar Kothare (2003) also follow a similar model.
In Prastabana – The Preamble (2025), while the thematic ambition of exploring marginalised borderland life and historical memory is commendable, the film’s execution remains disappointingly surface-level. The spoon-feeding approach resembles an ethnographic fieldwork diary rather than a dramatized cinematic experience. It is informative, certainly, but also tedious and unengaging.
On the other side of the narrative, the university campus becomes a battleground for political parties trying to secure popular positions among students. A direct conflict with a new party brings the Vice-Chancellor (Debojit Mazumdar) into the scene after a student receives a life-threatening threat. While these situations exist, there is little attempt to explore the contradictions between the two narrative worlds.
This is because student politics in Prastabana – The Preamble is caricaturish and underdeveloped. A rival student is attacked by politically backed goons, but the police—aligned with the opposing party—refuse to register his complaint. Professor Islam intervenes to help but himself faces scrutiny over his religious identity. What follows is a series of mechanical plot points that are predictable, with conflict designed merely to validate virtue.
Though the campus politics subplot points to several present-day concerns regarding rights, conflict, and democratic engagement among students, it is presented in a dull and rudimentary manner. Moreover, it fails to provide any meaningful closure. The film ends with the Vice-Chancellor leaving the institution while students continue to protest, raise slogans, and sing songs. The creative decision to conclude with a song significantly undermines whatever seriousness the film manages to retain.
Performance-wise, the lead actors—Parvi Barua and Tapan Das—deliver capable and sincere work, yet their performances rarely register as significant. Meanwhile, Kaushik Nath is almost forgotten in the film. Collectively, the actors are constrained by the script’s overreliance on dialogue, which leaves them little scope to perform. The film’s music, composed by Aniruddha and Tamara of Quan Bay, does not match the standard of their earlier work. Cinematography is by Bitul Das, with editing by A. Sreekar Prasad and Jhulan Krishna Mahanta. The film was released on January 16, 2026, in ten cinema halls across Assam but failed to run for more than a week in any theatre in the state.