Rains Don바카라�t Make Us Happy Anymore Review | Yashasvi Juyal바카라�s Short Doc Folds Epic Time Between Loss-strewn Letters

There can be distinct, fresh ways of telling an old story. Displacement, injustice, losing home and yet clasping onto shreds of it, the price of development바카라�these concerns have had both central and glancing presence in narratives. Yashasvi Juyal바카라�s short documentary Rains Don바카라�t Make Us Happy Anymore, premiering at Visions du Réel International Film Festival 2025, riffs on them but with fascinating slants. Through textures, impressions and snatches, it travels in languid spaces between the granularly observed and vaster energies. Juyal바카라�s film is a spiritually burnished, subliminal call of reckoning with spaces that have been wrenched from our grasp. How do we make the act of remembering those lost places one of vital refusal?

As with his earlier short, The Last Rhododendron (2021), Juyal바카라�s work is richly earth-bound and enmeshed with community, reflecting an intimate affinity for spaces, landscapes and scanning what lies within. Loss, foregoing the dearest of spaces, the winds of change that may keep us uprooted forever바카라�these underpin his cinema. But in his latest film, Juyal comes across as more liberated, almost as if he바카라�s ready to leap off the ground. Playful inserts perforate some images, situating the forced rupture at the heart. Rains Don바카라�t Make Us Happy Anymore is more metaphysical, unbound than heavily narrative, floating and bending across an abandoned land. Its angles are more oblique but display a new spirit of formal confidence, an ability to knit together varied evocations into a simmering whole. A man (Dheeraj Kumar), who stayed behind, becomes its elegiac chronicler; his letters to a woman who바카라�s left long back (Pushpa Rawat) frame our entry into this ghostly tale.

There바카라�s a mythic power to Juyal바카라�s telling. It is spectral, drifting and yet fully locks in what바카라�s been happing on ground. As rooted Juyal is in the contemporary moment, he바카라�s plumbing something more ancient and timeless here. Recounting is a politically loaded act to stave off oblivion. Our memories cannot be wholly erased.

This land, the village of Lohari in Uttarakhand, is visited by much violence바카라�its contours ripped through. It바카라�s been brutalized in the guise of reshaping, to be more amenable to development deals. But what about the human cost? Like with any 바카라�development바카라� project, the land바카라�s residents seem wholly unaccounted for, simply trusted to vanish the minute the territory comes under grabs or is seen as a new ground for infrastructural overhauls.

Rains Don바카라�t Make Us Happy Anymore is suffused with a sense of the haunted. People may have been pushed out from their homes in the crisis, but their stories and voices hang in the air바카라�aching, hopeful and nostalgic. An anecdote of workers crushed by a collapsing bridge interweaves devastation and grief with the desperate resilience and stubborn hopes of the few, who바카라�ve been huddling at a school for two years since eviction orders first came in 2022.

Where바카라�s rehabilitation? There바카라�s none바카라�only absolute abandonment by the government that just thrust JCB bulldozers tearing into the land flooded by the reservoir built for hydro power. It바카라�s said the dam supplies electricity to half of a state, but what of the village itself?

Epic cycles are invoked in letters바카라�gods and demons, fate and punishment. The film바카라�s tone is draped in a fable-like scent, moving from the intimate to that which straddles eons. To any native of the village바카라�s Jaunsari tribe, lore/myth becomes a pivotal interpreter of their trajectory, the ways in which their lives turn, for better or worse. The past can바카라�t be elided; it has much to bear on the present, though the accent of change may differ. Fables are languages to read destiny; it바카라�s loaded with that charge. 바카라�The gods are angry with us,바카라� the man insists. Is this misery divine wrath? This was where weapons were said to be built, only to be later on disposed on the pretext of them being ineffective.

Rains Don바카라�t Make Us Happy Anymore is as hushed as it is sweeping, inching into specks on a photograph. Dipesh Manral바카라�s camerawork and Ankit Thapa바카라�s sound design fuse to deliver an experience that바카라�s mystically both embodied and elusive. Rippling long shots often punctuate with harsh industrial sounds. A particular shot of a boat cutting through shimmering waters almost arrests this film바카라�s currents. We feel like spectators kept at an objective, externalized remove. Yet, Juyal simultaneously slips us into the skin of his saga, shaded by its own certain defiance. There바카라�s yearning in this documentary바카라�soft, plaintive nevertheless adamant and fierce. It insists gently but we cannot undermine its tug. Doleful yet lambent, Rains Don바카라�t Make Us Happy Anymore channels dislocation through an experiential, embedded lens.

Rains Don바카라�t Make Us Happy Anymore premiered at Visions du Réel International Film Festival 2025