“After The World Ends… It Begins Again” tells a story, while whispering several others — a story of three generations of women from West Bengal’s Kheria Sabar tribe, whose lives embody a quiet, perpetual determination to resist cultural erasure.

The Kheria Sabar people were a forest-dwelling, nomadic tribe where traditionally, men hunted and women foraged for sustenance. The British colonial administration deemed them a “Criminal Tribe” which dealt a resounding blow to their ecological prosperity, and in turn, self-reliance. Most historical narratives about Sabar people have focussed on the explicitly physical, punitive violence that Sabar men had to suffer — from arbitrary detention to custodial killings — a dark past which mustn’t be understated. But this film asks — what other violences and crises have been festering in the wake of such overt persecution? What other bodies have suffered more “invisible” wounds? Bodies are what bodies eat, drink, breathe, love — bodies are environments determined by our environment.

The present climate crisis looming thick over the native ecologies of Sabar people is re-imagined in the film as a morphed, urgent extension of state violence, now leaving an undeniably gendered imprint. Female artisans find their livelihoods threatened as date palm trees disappear, mothers are unable to nourish their children with indigenous plant varieties that were earlier readily available in environmental commons, girl children drop out from school as their parents migrate for work outside in the hope of marginally better pay. As the old world handed down to Sabar women by their mothers slowly fades, the dream that takes its place is one of education, awareness and resilience. Young Sabar girls dream of a future that rejects mere survival on the fringes of predatory modernisation. They demand security and consideration in an environmentally-devastated world instead.