A Wildflower Garden: Attend A Monsoon-Inspired Slow Cinema Experience In Kolkata

A good rain knows its time / Wind-borne, it comes silently in the night

And wets all things, yet / Wild is the way the dark black clouds

Leave the river boat fires lit

— Du Fu (712-770)

There's something profoundly cinematic about the monsoon. From the romanticism of Gene Kelly's iconic Singin' in the Rain (1952) to Bong Joon Ho's examination of the monsoon as a metaphor for the social inequalities between the characters in Parasite (2019), the monsoon rains have always inspired filmmakers to explore its multifaceted meanings in cinema.

A Wildflower Garden, a collaboration between Kolkata-based Tri Art & Culture and Mumbai-based Harkat Studios, draws inspiration from the environment's gifts to present a series of images and poetics designed to engage our attention and shift our perspective. Both inspired and nourished by the rains, the more than a month-long event creates a cinematic space that invites its audiences to linger with its images and the ideas they convey.

Designed as part of TRI's seasonal programming, A Wildflower Garden is not your typical film festival. It's an invitation for audiences to engage with cinema as slow-moving participants. The viewing room, open from Tuesday to Sunday, 11AM to 7PM, is free to the public and encourages viewers to linger, drift, and revisit. At the heart of the project is the larger idea that cinema, like the monsoon, can slow us down and change how we relate to the world around us.

The selected films — ranging from features to shorts, narrative to experimental, Indian arthouse to internationally acclaimed indie classics by auteurs like Agnès Varda and Bernd Lützeler — explore surreal dreamscapes, ecological reflections, and non-linear narrative structures, creating a cinematic field where attention can bloom slowly.

A Wildflower Garden is part of TRI's Monsoon Rooms project which sets up sensory, durational spaces at the gallery designed to engage visitors in a slower, more contemplative encounter with artistic practice. Rather than treating the season as a disruption, Monsoon Rooms embraces the stillness it brings, inviting the public to experience art through presence, patience, and attentiveness.

A Wildflower Garden is on view at TRI Art & Culture, Kolkata, until 21 September 2025. To learn more about the screening schedule follow Tri Art & Culture.

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