Written by: Kalpajyoti Bhuyan
Filmmaker Achinta Shankar’s Assamese film Homework is built on a premise so slender that it barely sustains the weight of a feature-length narrative. A school-going child from the city visits his grandparents’ village during the summer vacation, spends his days in the ever-welcoming lap of nature, and returns home transformed. This simple premise forms the plot of the film, which runs for 1 hour and 40 minutes.
It is not that a film cannot work around a single-line story. In fact, Assamese cinema has often found strength in such simple stories of modest, everyday life and experiences. But the difficulty with Homework lies not in what it wants to say, but rather in how insistently it says it. The critique is not about its convictions but about its communication.
Put differently, Homework resembles a diary entry or a collection of sequences depicting ordinary rural activities that the town-bred child enjoys to the fullest—climbing trees, playing with cousins, eating fresh home-cooked food, sowing seeds, planting paddy, enjoying the rain, and attending bhaona (religious theatre) performances at the namghar, among others.
More than the activities themselves, however, it is the sense of freedom, variety, and meaning found in the spirited rhythm of village life that the child—otherwise crushed by the weight of his school bag—comes to cherish. It is this essential and timely philosophy that the film should have leaned on instead of making itself resemble a travel vlog. Moreover, the eye for nostalgia also seems absent, reducing the film to a body without a soul.
As a result, the film’s structure feels more like a checklist of village experiences than a story in development. It says many things, yet ultimately feels as though it has very little to say. There is an abundance of observations, but they lack genuine or fresh insight. This is because the film is so didactic that all subtlety goes out of the window.
The cinematography, credited to Rupamjyoti Saikia and Himanshu Nath, mimics the look of a low-budget VCD film and fails to elevate the material beyond its modest aesthetic. It is so poorly shot that it fails even to exoticise the lush green landscapes of an Assamese village.
The conflict arrives too late. It begins when the child’s parents visit the village and find him ill toward the end of his vacation. This leads to a confrontation, as they accuse the uncle and aunt of negligence. They blame the uninhibited ways of rural life for the child’s illness, while concerns over his unfinished homework further raise the stakes. This is where the film explicitly spells out its ideas and themes because, as noted earlier, any possibility of subtlety has already been sacrificed at the altar of exposition.
The grandfather stands up for the household. He explains that homework is meant to be practice, not pressure, and effectively writes the moral at the end of a fable in bold ink. He also reveals that the child had already completed his homework because it is customary in the village for children to sit down and study every evening.
The idea that education has become more of an imposition and burden than a pursuit of enlightenment forms the core of the film. Instead of punishment, the grandfather uses moral fables and religious stories to draw the child away from mobile games. The film contrasts urban and rural ways of life, clearly identifying one as good and the other as bad. This binary opposition forms the foundation of its argument, although it is presented in such a simplified manner that it leaves little room for the shared complexities of both worlds.
The demands of modern life and the pressure to earn a livelihood have forced the child to grow up in relative isolation, without adequate parental care and attention. Consequently, much of his upbringing is entrusted to schoolteachers and private tutors. However, the teachers are caricatured as figures obsessed with deadlines and feared by their students. Although the film attempts to present this critique with humour, the underlying criticism remains blunt. In this context, it is also difficult to understand how the authorities of the International School of Guwahati agreed to the use of the institution’s real name as a stand-in for a school portrayed as intimidating children in the name of education.
Homework presents its ideas earnestly but without offering any fresh insight. The pacing is sluggish and unengaging, making the runtime feel considerably longer than it actually is. Ironically, the film’s promotional trailer on YouTube is a better version of the film itself. One noteworthy element is the recreated video version of Zubeen Garg’s song Jantra. Its commentary on the mechanical nature of modern life fits well with the concerns of the film. It also marks Zubeen Garg’s final appearance on the big screen.
Initially, Homework was scheduled to release on September 12, 2025, across Assam and other parts of India. The release was later rescheduled to September 26, 2025, because of the examination season and was again postponed following the untimely death of Zubeen Garg on September 19, 2025. This marked the second time an Achinta Shankar film was affected by unforeseen circumstances. His earlier action film Pratighat (2019), starring Amrita Gogoi, suffered during the 2019 CAA protests, which disrupted normal life across the state and forced the film out of theatres.
Homework finally released on May 15, 2026, in both Assamese and Hindi and clashed with Himjyoti Talukdar’s Moromor Deuta. While both films performed well among audiences, Moromor Deuta ran for six weeks in Assam’s cinema halls, whereas Homework completed a seven-week theatrical run. The cast includes Debajit Majumder, Hiranya Deka, Debajit Hazarika, Podmaraag Goswami, Chinmay Chakraborty, Rimpi Das, and Gayatri Mahanta, alongside child actors Surjyanga Jeeu Margherita, Brittanta Nayan Kashyap, and Alankrita Podmaraag Goswami.
A further edit could make this read more like a professional newspaper or journal review by tightening repetition, improving transitions, and sharpening some of the critical observations without changing your overall argument.
Kalpajyoti Bhuyan is a freelance writer and cine-journalist based in Guwahati. He can be reached at: [email protected]