In Person: Karthik Subramanian on Sleepwalker Archives

The winner of the award for Best Film within the Long Duration category of the Official India Selection at the Emami Art Experimental Film Festival, held in Kolkata from 11–14 September 2025, Karthik Subramanian’s Sleepwalker Archives (2024) traces the path of a river to reveal memories and stories that have long been forgotten. In this edited conversation, the director speaks about his process and research, landscape as cultural memory and the influence of Tamil Sangam poetry within the film.

As a child, Karthik travelled frequently from the city to the village where his grandparents lived—learning to see the world as it moved through the window of a bus or a train. Several years later, when he travelled to photograph the place where the river Ganga joins the Bay of Bengal, the scenes of the shifting land in front of him mixed inseparably with the lingering memories of the landscape through the moving windows. At this slippery edge between water and land began Karthik’s preoccupation with still and moving images, memory and history, the end and the beginning.

(Featured image: Still from Sleepwalker Archives [2024] by Karthik Subramanian. Image courtesy of the artist.)

(Recorded on 14 September 2025)

To learn more about this edition of EAEFF, watch conversations with Ketan Dua about his film Rafique Raat Ki Baahon Mein (2025), Mahishaa on Babasaheb in Bengaluru (2024) and Asmita Pal on A Very Clear Sunrise (2025). Also read Ritam Sengupta’s essay on Pinak Banik’s film Obsolete Skygazer - Enlightened Observer - Ignorant Truthseeker - Emaciated Entourage (2025), Santasil Mallik’s engagement with Maha Haj’s Upshot (2024), Vishal George’s reflections on Mohammed Jassim’s Bar Saar (2023) and Ishtayaq Rasool’s observations on Fileona Dkhar’s Ancestral Echoes (2022).