I, The Song (2024) ‘Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival’ Movie Review: Dechen Roder’s Visually Evocative Film Traverses Rediscovery and Growth (2025)

Dechen Roder’s “I, The Song” (2024) opens with a crisis. Nima (Tandin Bidha), a schoolteacher, finds herself in the middle of a storm when a viral video seemingly depicts her in an intimate act. Nima is reserved and concerned about propriety. After all, there have been severe ramifications in the wake of the widely circulated ‘blue film.’ Everyone believes it’s her in it, despite her insistence against it. Her denial is met with disbelief and resistance. She loses her job. Eyebrows are raised wherever she goes, harsh judgment tailing her.

In Bhutan, where the film is set, there’s little room to be truly alien. The line of one being familiar with the other runs long. Even her lover doubts her claims. Therefore, she embarks on a quest for the actual woman in the video. Only Meto, the woman Nima discovers, can restore the life that has slipped away from her, or so the latter thinks.

The two women share such an uncanny resemblance that Nima is mistaken everywhere at first glance for Meto. She counters this perception initially but over the course of the trajectory, there are subtle, profound shifts within her. Slowly yet firmly, the way Nima views the world, with what’s permissible, opens up. Meto is livelier and assertive about her desires. Both the women are, however, united in their individual sense of resolve. When we first meet Nima, she is too caught up in how others see her. She feels her life is thrown upside down, everything about her irrevocably disgraced. How can she retrieve it, unscathed?

“I, The Song” talks about change, acceptance, and expansion of the self. As one begins to take in radical possibilities like Nima does the more she burrows through the traces of Meto, life glints with new spaces for exploration. Nima can’t help but be pulled closer to unearthing the enigma Meto wields. A pursuit of someone becomes, in Roder’s gentle, probing grip, a conduit of self-discovery. Meto presents the provocative, nevertheless attractive possibilities of being and dreaming.

Roder conveys snippets from her life. Meto’s friend and ex-boyfriend regretfully say how Meto used to be humble and simple-minded, in keeping with her modest origins, before turning into someone unrecognizable. She yearned for more. There’s no end to the discrediting of a woman just because she dares to ask for more. There are all these swirling narratives about Meto having turned into a fallen woman. Nima doesn’t pop the question of the video to those she encounters but she gets the drift about Meto being liked no longer. Whispers abound of her mingling with the wrong sort of crowd, straying beyond the limits of acceptable behavior.

“I, The Song” drifts beyond the carapaces of realism into disconcerting, dreamlike territory. What’s true and tangible dislodges and morphs into a fascinating cross between the perceived and internalized. As Nima’s search deepens, she begins borrowing from the stories of Meto she hears and projects her own repressed self, seeking liberation. This transcendence situates itself through a brilliant, smartly realized blurring of the lines dividing the two women. Where one ends and the other sparks off – it gets increasingly shadowy, even as the mystery around Meto seems to vaporize. By osmosis, she draws from tales shared about Meto. Even the existence of the woman’s ex-boyfriend, Tandin (Jimmy Wangyal Tshering), a guitarist, seems to be luring Nima closer.

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