Sultana’s Dream: Lively in colour, lost in story

 When the Spanish film 'Sultana's Dream' (El sueño de la sultana) finally arrived at Star Cineplex last weekend, I felt the pull of two very different expectations. 

On one hand was the joy of seeing an animated feature loosely based upon Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's 1905 feminist utopia by the same name — a work that has long stood as one of South Asia's earliest and most imaginative feminist texts. 

On the other was the nagging question of how, over 120 years later, this visionary yet concise science-fiction novella might translate into a full-length film.

The original text, Begum Rokeya's 'Sultana's Dream', tells a short but striking tale—Sultana falls asleep and dreams of Ladyland, a world entirely run by women through scientific knowledge and rational governance while men are locked indoors. 

The satirical tale's brevity and sharpness are part of its enduring power. 

But Sultana's Dream the film — an 86-minute animated drama directed by Isabel Herguera, co-written with Gianmarco Serra — feels like something else entirely. 

For all its aesthetic triumphs, Sultana's Dream rarely settles into a compelling narrative. Inés's journey is poetic; her emotional currents are hinted at rather than properly articulated; and the connection between her inner world and Rokeya's original vision feels tenuous. 

Divided into three parts, the film begins with Inés, a young Spanish artist and filmmaker, travelling in India. 

She accidentally discovers Rokeya's story in a bookshop and is captivated. This encounter propels her on a personal, and at times perplexing and surreal, journey across landscapes in search of Rokeya herself. 

Herguera's animation blends multiple techniques: ink and watercolour for Inés's real-world sequences, shadow puppetry to evoke historical memory, and richly patterned Mendhi-inspired animation to conjure the utopian Ladyland. 

Sometimes it was a bit difficult to pace up with the switching of languages – Bangla, English, Hindi, Italian, Spanish and Basque. It took me moments to understand whether I was listening to Spanish or Spanish-accented English. 

But speaking of the animation, I was struck by its visual boldness. Colour washes over narrative like a tide, rhythmically rising and falling, sometimes in moments of unearthly beauty. 

The film's palette — rich browns, swirling pastels, and flickering monochrome shadows — often feels like an immersive painting rather than a sequence of scenes. Yet this very beauty eventually became a kind of mirage.

For all its aesthetic triumphs, the film rarely settles into a compelling narrative. Inés's journey is poetic; her emotional currents are hinted at rather than properly articulated; and the connection between her inner world and Rokeya's original vision feels tenuous. 

Ladyland arrives not as a dramatic locus but as a dream within a dream which feels ethereal, evocative, but remarkably distant from the razor-sharp clarity of the source material. 

In Rokeya's texts, Sultana's visit to Ladyland is a tightly structured reversal that forces us to confront the absurdities and injustices of gender hierarchy. Here, the utopia becomes something else: a dreamscape without a clear stake.

At times, the narrative feels so scattered that it resembles an art installation more than a film. The sequence can shift abruptly from Inés's internal monologue to scenes of imagined landscapes with little structural thread to hold them together. 

Instead of grounding the viewer in the logic of transformation — how Ladyland came to be, what it means for Sultana or for Inés — it moves laterally, pivoting on mood and metaphor. 

It was as though I had watched a dream that shattered into fragments the moment I tried to grasp its meaning.

For Bangladeshi audiences previously familiar with the original text's radical and pointed simplicity, the disconnect can feel especially pronounced. Rokeya's story was written in an era when women's education and public participation were deeply contested, and its utopian impulse is less about whimsy than about radical possibility.  The film flirts with that impulse but never fully carries its weight into cinematic form.

In that sense, Sultana's Dream the movie becomes less an adaptation and more an interpretation — an interpretation that privileges aesthetic richness over narrative propulsion. 

And while there is undeniable merit in visual poetry, it ultimately left me longing for something firmer— a clearer tether to the intellectual clarity and social critique that made Rokeya's work radical in the first place.