Busan-Winning ‘Shape of Momo’ Director Tribeny Rai Turns a Girl’s Death Into a Village Boundary Dispute in Asian Project Market Drama ‘A Chronicle of Minor Things’

Two villages squabble over which of them holds jurisdiction over the spot where a 15-year-old girl died in “A Chronicle of Minor Things,” the new project from “Shape of Momo” director Tribeny Rai. The working-titled project is part of the Asian Project Market, which runs within the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM). The girl is discovered at daybreak, hanging from a tree. Her body has not yet been cut down when the quarrel begins, because the tree is rooted in one village while the branch she hangs from stretches over the other. In death, she turns into a border dispute. Rai’s debut, “Shape of Momo,” explored the close-knit relationships within a household of women. It premiered at Busan in 2025, where it won the Songwon Vision Award and the Taipei Film Commission Award, and later took the Golden Royal Bengal Tiger Award at the Kolkata International Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. This time, Rai is turning her attention to her own village. “The village becomes a microcosm where power, money, and politics enter ordinary life in intimate ways, until we stop seeing them as systems at all,” she says. Popular on Variety Rai says she gravitates toward stories that feel pressing to her right now, and given the state of the world, this one feels timely. She aims to build a world rooted firmly in the village that viewers will slowly come to see as their own. “I want the film to leave behind a quiet, unsettling realization – this is not a world apart from ours; it is the world we already live in,” she says. The script is in development. Producer Kislay, who worked with Rai on “Shape of Momo,” says Rai has a gift for capturing characters with all their complications and contradictions, and that the new film widens her lens from a single family to a whole hilltop community whose calm surface hides a shifting world. What especially struck Kislay is how she treats its picturesque setting. “In most films, such a setting might become a space of leisure or escape. Here, it becomes a metaphor for the larger forces at play, forces that are shaping both Bishnu, the protagonist, and the world around him,” Kislay says. At the APM, the team hopes to find co-producers and financiers to move the project forward. Though grounded in a particular culture, the film deals with ambition, desire and social change, themes the producer believes will speak to audiences internationally.