A Homegrown Documentary Captures The Loss Of Koli Community's Connection With The Sea

As time passes, things change. We lose people, lifestyles, dreams, and are left with an imprint of the past. There is this heaviness with which we look back at them, feeling crushed under the weight of all that we have lost. Its absence grips us more than its presence ever did. All those who have lived long enough know this story well. It’s a part of being human. The way we grieve things only after they’re gone, and realize too late how precious they were.

Sudarshan Sawant's debut documentary, Lost Songs of Sundari taps into that feeling of loss. The film unfolds in Mumbai, a city that was once a collection of islands, held together by water, history, and its indigenous Koli community. But as modern bridges rise and land reclamation pushes forward, this connection to the sea is slowly being severed. The Kolis, the original fisherfolk of Mumbai, are watching their way of life slip away. The film, through the lens of mythology and personal stories, brings their fading world into sharp focus.

The heart of the story is Sundari, a mythical ferryboat that once carried people across creeks, long before concrete bridges spanned the waters. She was the thread tying together lives, memories, and a relationship with nature that is now being overwritten by relentless urbanization. The film follows three perspectives: a woman who keeps the legend of Sundari alive, an aging ferry operator still navigating the waters in the shadow of modern infrastructure, and a child witnessing these changes with innocent eyes. Through them, we see the darker side of progress and how it can erase an entire way of life.

Lost Songs of Sundari is a conversation about the larger shifts happening in Mumbai and beyond. It’s about the Indigenous peoples' connection to water, the slow erasure of traditions, and the cost of so-called development. The sea, once a source of life and livelihood for the Kolis, is now something they are being pushed away from. Their songs, their stories, and their very presence is being drowned out by the noise of a rapidly expanding city.

An exceptional debut, the film, even when depicting something tragic, doesn't rely on the subject to elicit empathy. Even before you know who is being spoken about, you begin to care for them, which is largely a stylistic and filmic achievement. It is fluent in emotion. In this hyper-stimulated time when the internet has numbed us to crisis after crisis, where even the most tragic events become fleeting headlines that disappear with a scroll, Sudarshan's treatment of the film makes it an invitation to just sit with the grief of losing something irreplaceable.

Through a poignant intersection of mythology and folklore and the real, lived experiences of people, the filmmaker shifts an environmental and cultural crisis into a human one. Lost Songs of Sundari is where your political, ideological and socio-economic beliefs of what a better world looks like, and your expectations of a shiny new future fall weak against the heartbreak of one that we have already lost.

Follow Sudarshan here and watch the trailer below:

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