Swapner Din is a road movie in the truest sense. Not only did the film travel far and wide (film festivals in Toronto, London, Athens, Tokyo, London and more) for four years before its home run on Thursday, but the three characters in the film too criss-cross a vast (though rural) landscape, in an inward quest for a place they can call home.

It’s about rootlessness, about dreams that keep one going and about people bonding under extraordinary circumstances.

The road, or the journey, is the destination of Swapner Din. It’s where three strangers — Paresh, a government employee who travels across villages with his projector showing films on public awareness, Chapal, a driver, and Amina, a refugee — meet by a quirk of fate and clamber on to a jeep for an eventful journey.

But Swapner Din is not a heart-wrenching tale, a journey of epic proportions. It’s rather like a short story, where fragments of experience are stitched together with a thread of common emotion and hurtle towards an end that catches you unawares. What makes Swapner Din watchable, even enjoyable, is its innate sense of humour. And the drama that livens up the journey.

For twists and turns, there are insurgents hijacking the government jeep, Paresh and Chapal foiling their plan, a dwarf stealing Paresh’s projector from the jeep, villagers misguiding them in order to find the thief...

The screenplay is a seamless blend of reality and fantasy. If Paresh fantasises about his soulmate (Raima Sen, an actress, who continuously flits in and out of his dreams), Chapal dreams of a good life in Dubai and the widowed and pregnant Amina longs to return home to Bangladesh with her unborn child.

Cinematographer Venu’s camera makes Swapner Din look like a fluid painting — a canvas dominated by bold brushstrokes of blue and grey — shot in the hours between night and daybreak. Swapner Din is quite a visual treat, better than Dasgupta’s last release Kaalpurush.

The film rests on Prosenjit, Rajesh Sharma and Rimii Sen, who display disarming flair. Prosenjit breaks out of his starry mould to get into the skin of this do-gooder man, daydreaming to leave his hurtful past behind. Rajesh Sharma is competent as a man of the world, though a little naive. Rimii Sen gets her body language and diction right for a poor Bangladeshi woman, except for her plucked eyebrows.