At first, Roohrangi seems disarmingly elusive. A chance conversation with a man in a gay cruising forest. Meandering close-ups of tree bark. Archival fragments, dreams, whispered recollections, wandering paths through the forest. Director Tusharr Madhavv seems content to let these elements drift alongside one another, but gradually moments in the film begin to resonate with those that came before, as though an underlying pattern had been there all along.

Roohrangi expects us to surrender to its rhythm before asking us to interpret its meanings. Its subject appears through an accumulation of small signs, fleeting encounters, and half-recognised images until, almost imperceptibly, they align into something larger. What appears is a memory of the filmmaker’s grandfather, whose face, marked by patches of leucoderma, resembled to the young Madhavv a forest of miraculous white and brown trees. The film continually returns to this image, allowing it to echo through leaves, bark, skin, and photographic textures until seemingly distant memories begin to speak the same visual language. Madhavv’s film navigates the porous boundaries between memory and imagination, tracing unexpected correspondences between queer desire, family history, and the landscapes that contain them both.

TW