His recent short film Runanubandh was selected for the National Competition at the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) 2026, marking another step in his continuing engagement with contemporary independent cinema.

Choudhury began making films without formal training in filmmaking, developing his practice through independent work and eight years in advertising. His body of work spans feature films, short films and television, with a recurring interest in human psychology, relationships, memory and the ways personal consciousness shapes our experience of the world.

His debut feature Alifa established his presence in Indian independent cinema. His short film Fishing Surmai (2014), set in coastal Maharashtra, explored another social and geographical landscape, while Cafe Storyteller received the Best Film and Best Director awards at the Assam State Film Awards in 2022.

With Duwardoli (Reverie), Choudhury returns to the feature format after a decade, moving further into an intimate and psychologically layered form of storytelling. Set in Assam, the film explores the fragile boundaries between observation, memory, reality and imagination.

I waited almost ten years to make my second film. There were times during those years when I wondered whether I would make another film at all. Life had taken me through places I had not anticipated, and a personal separation eventually forced me to confront something I had perhaps been avoiding for a very long time. It made me look backwards towards relationships, towards separation, towards childhood, and towards the invisible ways in which the experiences of our early lives continue to shape the people we become. The film is not autobiographical in the conventional sense. Its characters and circumstances are not a reconstruction of my life. But its emotional core is deeply personal. Niti’s childhood wound, the confusion and trauma of a father leaving when she was very young, and the unresolved love and longing that survive alongside that memory, comes from a deeply personal place within me.

But while developing the film, I became equally interested in another question. What really happens when someone becomes conscious of the wounds they have inherited? Can a person choose not to pass them on? This question led me to Prachir. Prachir has his own traumatic childhood. His relationship with his mother leaves deep emotional impressions on him, shaping his understanding of intimacy, conflict and attachment as he grows older. As an adult, he recognises that some of the patterns within his marriage are connected to those unresolved childhood experiences. He begins to understand that the people we love can sometimes become mirrors of the relationships we have struggled to understand within our own families.

But Prachir is not merely a product of his past. That distinction became very important to me. Through self-awareness, reflection and his work with people struggling with relationships, he attempts to understand the mechanisms of pain rather than simply reproduce them. He tries to interrupt the inheritance of emotional violence and confusion. In that sense, Prachir becomes a cycle breaker. His greatest act of rebellion is not against another person, but against a destiny that seems to have been written for him by his childhood. He chooses consciousness over repetition. And perhaps that is why Niti is drawn towards him.

Niti and Prachir are carrying different versions of the same invisible burden. She is trying to understand the person who left her; he is trying to understand the relationships that shaped him. One is looking backwards towards an absent father. The other is looking backwards towards a difficult mother and the emotional patterns that followed him into adulthood.

Human relationships and the emotional exchanges between people have always interested me. At the heart of every family, every relationship and society itself are the masculine and feminine traits we carry. They create connection, but they also create conflict.

I have always been struck by how something seemingly small can grow into a serious conflict and leave the deepest wounds in us. We become trapped within our own emotions, repeating the same patterns until we recognise that, often, the problem begins with us.

One mistake, one wrong decision, can take us to a point from which there is no return.

With Duwardoli (Reverie), I wanted to look at these fragile spaces between people without judging them. More than anything, I wanted to celebrate empathy, perhaps the greatest gift humanity has been given, and the possibility that understanding another person can sometimes break a cycle we have created ourselves.