Currently in production, the film is expected to be released on October 3, 2022, on the fifth death anniversary of Musamoni Panigrahi, fondly called Nani Ma by her neighbours. The film would be the first-ever documentary made entirely in the Northern/Baleswari dialect of India's Odia language. The story revolves around oral history narrated by Nani Ma. Born in the 1920s in pre-independent rural India in a coastal village in the Balasore district of Odisha, she never got to go beyond the first few days of school.
The colonial British rule brought the human-made Orissa famine of 1866, killing nearly 5 million people, one-third of the population. The scar of this disaster would affect generations to come. Five decades later, the society had become highly religious and patriarchial, with only a few with wealth and power and many struggling to survive. Society was more broken than ever and treated every girl child as a burden whose wedding would require dowry that a family could not afford. Young girls would learn the skills to run a household from their mothers and other elderly women as the men went to work after basic schooling. Young girls married and became mothers even before becoming adults, and their transition in life was from one form of social injustice to another. Nani Ma carried a piece of the 1920s Orissa within herself and the dark night of the soul. The anguish throughout her life reached its peak with her early widowhood. Her oral history is soaked with the melancholy of deep suffering through most of her childhood and youth and finding solace later in the Mahima Dharma, the people’s religion led by Adivasi and Dalit leaders. In her folklore and songs, the gods suffer just like humans, and the demons are rational beings.
The film also captures in detail through these songs and stories in a 1920s register of the western variant of the Baleswari-Odia, a dialect hardly documented as audiovisual media. Additionally, commentaries from two noted academic researchers, Damayanti Beshra and Panchanan Mohanty and author Laxmikant Tripathy dissect respectively the culture of women resistance, the unique and diverse linguistic features of Baleswari-Odia, and its chronological development.
