DIFF 2025 : I, The Song | Dechen Roder’s Seraphic Exploration Of Identity, Illusion & Invention

I, The Song (2024) floats halfway between memory, illusion and reality, where the internet becomes the tool of propagating identities and cultural assets—both tangible and intangible. In Bhutan, a story of two doppelgängers, a wide-spread “blue-video” and a lost traditional song coalesce to ask : What does it mean to be one person and then another? How do you then reconcile with yourself knowing you’re suddenly leading a double-life? Dechen Roder’s film unravels the answers with a calm provocation that sneaks up on you. Nima (Tandin Bidha) has stepped off the moral cliff her quiet life stood on, pushed by a viral intimate video that transforms her from a mild-mannered teacher in Thimphu to the bewildered protagonist of a national scandal.

The mystery here remains that Nima realises it isn’t her but someone else who resembles her. Films on mistaken identities are not uncommon, although to be tethered by such a poetic and political thread feels like a triumph. Bhutan itself stands like a potent metaphor for digitisation, where constant surveillance is seeping into a culture built on protectiveness and communal intimacy. Folklore makes this even more unsettling as identity is porous in this worldview. Spirits, reincarnation, and symbolic doubles already sit close to everyday belief, hence a stolen identity in this film is never just intangible. It becomes social, emotional, even metaphysical, hinting at a self fractured by a digital world that mercilessly refuses to slow down.

Nima loses her job and her boyfriend; eyes wander and the air changes in every room that she walks in. The supposedly viral video featuring her doppelgänger Meto flips a switch inside of her to abandon her safe and uneventful life—the illusion of which has now shattered—to clear her name. Meanwhile, Roder’s inspiration from real incidents of non-consensual recordings in Bhutan adds the film’s sharpest edge. In a population of 700,000, privacy is fragile, and scandal travels fast. Victims are rarely seen as victims—a truth Nima painfully embodies.

Her journey to the south unravels with the anxious energy of someone clinging to dignity, trying to prove she’s “not that kind of a woman”. Although, it is too late—she walks straight into Meto’s unapologetic shadow. Meto (also played by Bidha) dreamt of being a performer and has now mysteriously disappeared. The web tangles onto itself as everyone recalls a different version of Meto, which is unfair because she herself isn’t around to correct any of them.

Her conflicted feelings towards this new-found obsession with Meto’s life overwhelms her, but she cannot simply pull away and start her life over. Finding this woman then becomes less about proving she’s innocent and more about an inherent longing for another life that she could have been living. Or perhaps, Meto becomes a metaphysical twin whose existence she cannot shake off.  As Nima sifts through these lives, she becomes strangely porous. Her anger folds into something tender and unnervingly protective. Somewhere between the neon bars, the fog-soaked roads, and softly sung Dzongkha melodies, Nima realises she’s no longer just clearing her name, but solving a disappearance that the rest of the country has quietly accepted as an inconvenience. 

Meto’s grandmother waits for her return, guarding a sacred song that “city people” stole. One wonders how a song can be lost at all. If it can slip away, what does it take to protect its memory? Oral traditions and folk histories have been colonised, repackaged and plagiarised for generations. In the digital age, the strain between cultural identity, performance and the endless loop of reinterpretations becomes even more visible. It also reads almost like a commentary on AI because the moment something enters the wider world—a foreign and detached one—it risks being taken without consent or context. For communities whose cultural memory anchors their identity, theft becomes a symbolic death.

Even at nearly two hours, the film holds its ground with scenes that bloom visually and atmospherically. Roder doesn’t dip into exotic clichés often projected onto Bhutan. Instead, she crafts something oneiric and quietly rebellious, refusing to flatten her world for easy consumption. While the runtime may test patience, it justifies its poetic pace and raw ambition. The music becomes its own inquiry. Traditional songs drift through daily chores, car radios, and intimate bar gatherings. The film’s subplot about a sacred melody “stolen” by urban performers becomes a parallel to Nima’s own violation. Both the woman and the village are stripped of something essential by careless spectators. The private and collective losses echo each other, and suddenly a missing girl and a missing song don’t feel that different. This careful stitching of memory, intuition and self-interrogation gives the film its surreal charge and its quiet, startling power. Tashi Dorji’s score bridges timelines and terrains, weaving idiosyncratic strings and raw textures that shape the film’s emotional spine.

Meto’s ex-boyfriend Tandin (Jimmy Wangyal Tshering) is a musician who sings at a bar, and is taken aback seeing Nima for the first time. People keep insisting Nima is Meto putting on a performance, but Tandin is the only one who actually pays attention enough to discern between them. The film keeps circling this doubt, letting us question how quickly we decide a woman is lying just because she doesn’t fit our idea of who she should be. And then another thought slips in: even if Nima were Meto, would it be terrible? A striking exchange between Tandin and Nima lingers, where he asks if she is distancing herself from Meto simply because Meto has crossed lines she herself never imagined. The questions it raises about dignity, sexuality and the quiet arrogance of assuming moral superiority expose how easily people strip others of their humaneness. 

As Nima and Meto’s story unfolds, the mystery only grows more tangled, refusing simple answers. Meto’s former colleagues and friends offer versions of her that feel vivid, yet strangely disconnected—as if each remembered a different woman entirely. Their fragments push Nima into her own spiral of recognition and doubt, forcing her to confront how much of herself she sees in Meto and what that says about where Meto might have gone when she vanished. Whispers cast her as a fallen figure, drifting into the wrong circles. Nima never asks directly about the scandalous video but senses the quiet verdict everywhere. Nobody seems to like Meto anymore or perhaps they resent losing control of her narrative. 

Roder turns a personal catastrophe into a commentary on collective harm. She redraws a national postcard—only this time the gloss carries teeth. The non-linear structure jumps between past and present, though the switches land awkwardly sometimes. The idea works in theory, but the execution can feel muddled. The almost-painterly visuals by Rangoli Agarwal drifting between the city, the village and the dreamscapes allow for a visceral viewing experience. Many scenes are lit with real care, and some moments linger long after. The scene where Meto connects the moles on Tandin’s back is especially memorable, as is their first meeting, bathed in beautiful mango-drenched lighting.  

Through humour and quiet empathy, Roder charts Nima’s shifting judgements until she begins coveting the freedom she once dismissed. I, the Song stays rooted in the idea of finding one’s voice after any kind of violation, whether social, emotional or physical. Roder also uses this premise to quietly expose how shaky a sense of self can become when it keeps getting shaped by societal gaze. The film lingers as a sharp, shadowy meditation on plagiarism, shame, desire, and self-perception in the stories women reclaim for themselves, insisting every stolen fragment—whether a body or a melody—deserves to be recovered.