There’s something about the way nostalgia hits you when you’re least prepared for it. Like stepping off a Paris metro and hearing your mother tongue from a stranger’s lips. Or catching the scent of cardamom tea in a foreign city that suddenly makes your chest tight with longing.
This is precisely the territory that Vinnie Ann Bose explores in Sulaimani, her exquisite stop-motion short film that premiered at French festivals to critical acclaim.
Through the chance encounter of two Malayalam women in a Parisian restaurant, Vinnie crafts something rare in diaspora cinema – a story that doesn’t pander or preach, but simply observes the complex ways immigrants carry their homes within them.
The film opens on a Christmas evening metro ride. Alia, sharp-featured with short hair and piercings, notices Neena, traditionally dressed in a salwar kameez, speaking Malayalam on her phone. When Neena accidentally leaves her tiffin box behind, Alia follows her to return it, ending up at Sulaimani – a South Indian restaurant that becomes the stage for an encounter that neither woman expected.
What follows is a meditation on identity that feels refreshingly honest. Vinnie doesn’t give us the usual saccharine reunion of compatriots abroad. Instead, she presents two women shaped by vastly different circumstances of departure.
Alia, the defiant daughter who chose studies over marriage, carries her rebellion in her appearance and her initial denial of being Indian. Neena, the dutiful mother who came to work after her husband lost his job, still speaks halting French with a South Indian accent and wears her homeland on her sleeve.
The marvel of Sulaimani lies in its refusal to romanticize these differences. Both women are drowning in their own ways – one in assimilation, the other in preservation. The film’s Malayalam dialogue is particularly noteworthy, avoiding the cringe-worthy attempts at authenticity that plague most international productions.
You can sense there’s a Malayalam sensibility behind the camera, someone who understands the weight of words like “sulaimani” – a term that stops Alia in her tracks with its childhood associations of post-meal tea in Muslim homes.
The stop-motion animation serves the story beautifully, perhaps better than live-action ever could. The medium allows for an intimacy and universality that flesh-and-blood actors might have complicated with their own baggage.
Had this been made with the usual Malayalam cinema suspects (think Manju Warrier and Rima Kallingal as they so emphatically destroyed Bonnie & Clyde) the film would have likely lost its subtle power to more obvious emotional manipulation.
Vinnie, reportedly wrote the film during her own period of homesickness while studying at La Poudrière in France. She brings a lived authenticity to the immigrant experience. The film was supported by France’s national film board CNC and received funding from the Festival National de Film d’Animation de Rennes, providing her with a three-month residency where she crafted the puppets and restaurant sets that bring the story to life.
The restaurant becomes more than just a setting: it’s a capsule of home recreated in exile, complete with its own hierarchies and familiarities. The chef’s casual hospitality, asking Alia to stay for dinner, captures that particular South Asian warmth that transcends borders. But Vinnie is too honest a filmmaker to let this moment become purely comforting. Instead, she uses it to peel back the layers of both women’s stories through food and conversation.
What emerges is a portrait of how class and circumstance shape the immigrant experience differently. Alia’s departure was an act of self-determination; Neena’s was driven by economic necessity. One story is about escaping expectations; the other about fulfilling responsibilities. Yet both women share the peculiar loneliness of displacement – that sense of being suspended between worlds.
The film’s greatest strength is its understanding that most diaspora connections are exactly what it portrays – fleeting, peripheral, ephemeral. Like the whiff of sulaimani tea, these encounters provide momentary comfort before both parties return to their separate struggles with belonging.
In just twenty minutes, Sulaimani manages to capture something essential about the immigrant condition: that home isn’t a place you can simply leave behind or easily recreate.
It lives in the taste of familiar food, the sound of your mother tongue, the recognition in a stranger’s eyes. Sometimes it finds you when you least expect it, in a Parisian restaurant on a winter evening, reminding you of who you were before. If Anjali Menon put love in sulaimani, Vinnie puts identity and longing – and that makes all the difference.
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