Written by, July 7 -- Kalpajyoti Bhuyan

Filmmaker Achinta Shankar's Assamese film Homework is built on a premise so slender that it barely sustains the weight of a feature-length narrative. A school-going child from the city visits his grandparents' village during the summer vacation, spends his days in the ever-welcoming lap of nature, and returns home transformed. This simple premise forms the plot of the film, which runs for 1 hour and 40 minutes.

It is not that a film cannot work around a single-line story. In fact, Assamese cinema has often found strength in such simple stories of modest, everyday life and experiences. But the difficulty with Homework lies not in what it wants to say, but rather in how insistently it says it. The c...