Returning to the city he called "home," acclaimed filmmaker Pradip Kurbah presented his latest masterpiece, Ha Lyngkha Bneng or The Elysian Field, at the 24th Pune International Film Festival. Set in the year 2047 in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, the film is a haunting, magic-realist exploration of community resilience in a world that has largely moved on.
Fresh off a historic sweep at the 47th Moscow International Film Festival securing Best Film, Best Director, and the NETPAC Award; the Khasi-language feature has emerged as a regional echo having global resonance.
The Elysian Field imagines a haunting vision of Laitduh, a village slowly emptied by time, migration, and the promises of development. The film transports viewers into a depopulated landscape where only six residents remain; Livingstone, Helen, Maia, Friday, Promise, and Complete, clinging to a starkly minimal existence even as the world beyond their hills moves rapidly toward urban expansion.
While the outside world is reshaped by what is repeatedly described as “development,” Laitduh exists in quiet suspension, bearing the weight of abandonment and endurance.
Director Pradip Kurbah describes this setting as the “space between earth and heaven,” a phrase that captures both the physical isolation and the metaphysical stillness of the village. The terrain is neither fully alive nor entirely lost, functioning instead as a threshold where memory, survival, and waiting converge. This in-between quality shapes the film’s tone, allowing the landscape itself to emerge as a central character.
The film opens with a long take that immediately immerses the viewer in this fragile world. A choir of singers gathers as a body arrives in the village, an image that underscores how, in Laitduh, death is never private. Each passing becomes a collective wound, a shared reckoning for a community that continues to shrink with every loss.
This sense of quiet devastation is heightened by an unsettling contrast. As a radio announcer cheerfully speaks of high-tech projects transforming Meghalaya, the residents of Laitduh struggle with frequent power cuts and the bare essentials of survival. The optimism of progress, broadcast from afar, collides with lived reality, revealing a stark paradox between futuristic ambition and the elemental hardships faced by those left behind in this ghost village of the future.
For me, paradise depends on the perspective of the people who live in it
Pradip Kurbah
Silence emerges as one of the film’s most powerful narrative tools, shaping both mood and meaning. During a post-screening interaction, director Pradip Kurbah offered rare insight into his creative process, explaining that the extensive use of quiet was a conscious choice meant to reflect forms of isolation that persist even within modern, crowded societies. By stripping away constant dialogue and sound, the film invites viewers to sit with absence, stillness, and the unspoken distances between people.
Kurbah was careful to frame the film not as a prediction of what is to come, but as a warning rooted in the present. Reflecting on the idea of paradise, he added, “For me, paradise depends on the perspective of the people who live in it,” suggesting that decline or harmony is shaped as much by human choices as by circumstance.
The film is not a prophecy; it is a caution. We still have time. Don’t let 2047 look like that
Pradip Kurbah
This sense of suspended time and restrained emotion is visually reinforced by the cinematographer Pradip Daimary, whose compositions capture the stillness of Laitduh with precision and restraint. Through carefully framed images, moments of black comedy, and the quiet squabbles of everyday life, the film subtly reimagines social interaction, allowing silence and perspective to become central forces in how the story unfolds.
