Rajaditya Banerjee’s documentary “Lost for Words” has been nominated in the 20th Dhaka International Film Festival. The film will be screened on 19th January 2022, from 3 pm, in the Public Library Auditorium, and on 20th January at the National Art Gallery of Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. This film is also competing in the ‘Cinema of World’ category (LWF).

 In ‘Lost for Words’, Rajaditya has highlighted the obsolete language ‘Toto’ and the lifestyle of the people who use this language as his subject.

After independence, 150 languages have become obsolete. According to the survey reports, one language becomes obsolete every four months. And now, 30 languages are critically in danger. Toto language is the language of nearly 1,585 people, who live in a village of India- Bhutan border with the same name. Even 300-400 people among them have migrated from the village. So, nowadays, a total of 1,000-1,300 people use this language. UNESCO has mentioned this language as ‘critically endangered’.

Why this language is becoming an extinct language day by day, why the people, who use this language, have to fight to save it, how three fighters of this dialect are fighting hard to save their mother tongue― these are the main key point of this film.

Dhaniram Toto is the first to write a novel in the Toto language. There were no alphabets of this language. In the year 2014, Dhaniram Toto invented the alphabet of the Toto language. He is passionate to collect books related to phonetics, linguistics, and paleography. He took an oath to establish this language officially on 21st February, International Mother Language Day.

This 90 minutes documentary has been shot by Tanmoy Karmakar, and Giridhari Garai and Shubhojit Roy were in the charge of additional cinematography. The sound and the music scape of this film are created by Backbenchers. The film is edited by Sumanta Sarkar.

With this film, the director wants to highlight the struggle of Dhaniram Toto, Satyajit Toto, and Biplab Nayak for saving their mother language.

Priyanka Dutta