You Don't Belong

Paban Das is a baul singer living in France singing songs of wandering minstrels. Arun Chakraborty is a poet living a quietly content life in a hamlet of West Bengal. Bhoomi is a band from Kolkata, popular for their renditions of folk tunes. Prabudhdha is a musician with a history of protest music. Paraspather is an erstwhile band left with memories of their popular songs and lost fame. Disparate characters who are bound together by a filmmaker's search for the elusive author of a song, popular in collective memory as a traditional folk song. What follows is a long self-reflexive journey into the world of folk, a journey, which nudges established ideas of home, nostalgia, belonging, and authorship as the film explores deeper into the song that serves for a metaphor of the contemporary fragmented times. Travelling across remembered lands and forgotten histories following the unseen path of migration that music takes, 'You Don't Belong' asks some important questions about the encounter between art and mass production, creation and ownership in a country rich with myriad folk and oral traditions.