Bio 1
Lipika Singh Darai is a director, writer, and editor based in India. She is an alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India with a specialisation in Film sound recording and design. She has been making socio-cultural films in Odisha, where she belongs to the Ho Indigenous community. Lipika has received four National Film Awards, country's prominent cinema award, for direction, sound recording, and narration in the non-feature film section.
She is known for her prominent documentary Some Stories around Witches and the short film The Waterfall. Her documentary Night and Fear (2023) premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in Ammodo Tiger Short competition. She is developing her debut fiction feature Birdwoman which has received the Hubert Bals Development Fund 2023. She is one of the ten creative talents in Bafta Breakthrough-India 2023. Her new Film Essay B and S premiered at IFFR 2025.
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Bio 2
A lucid dreamer who loves spending time looking at the sky and the teak tree next to her house. Her mother tongue is Ho, an indigenous language, but she expresses and makes films in Odia language which is her medium of schooling. Lipika lives and makes films in Odisha, and volunteers for Film Society Bhubaneswar. She is a mentor for Docustan India.
1999,Jharsuguda , VSS high school
2023, Bhubaneswar, Odisha
2009, first work, koraput, Odisha
3yr, Film School
Lipika Singh Darai Biography
DIRECTOR | WRITER | EDITOR
She was born in a village called Damasahi, in Odisha, in November winter to a Ho Adivasi family
Studied in Aurobindo Integral School, Baripada, and many government schools across Odisha
Her father taught her how to ride a Yezdi motorbike at 16
As a child, she was extremely sensitive. She hallucinated fragrances
She had an amazing music teacher. She was 6. He was 60. When she grew up, tracing her late music teacher became her first film
She had a childhood fantasy of being featured on the cover of a magazine
As she was trained in music, she thought of pursuing Audiography at FTII, Pune
Making images and sounds awakened in her a dreamlike interior. Since then, filmmaking has not merely been her medium, but the method by which she thinks, feels, and locates herself within the act of making.
Working from Odisha—where independent filmmaking remains profoundly difficult; it is a conscious choice, a principled decision to persist at the margins
