Aditya Vikram Sengupta plans his next

Only this year, he was hosted Cannes Talent Lab at with 15 other international directors. But Aditya Vikram Sengupta, who travelled to the festival with his project, Memories & My Mother, has now put it on hold for another film, Jonaki (working title).Starring yesteryear actress

Lolita Chatterjee

in the lead, the film is about dreams and reality .
���An 80-year-old woman, belonging to a certain time in

Bengal

, emerges from the forest one day and spends a few days in an abandoned school. There she finds a dozen people; among them is her childhood friend. It is a narra tive of strong feelings, told through dreams. The thing is, I dream a lot and remember most of my dreams,��� said Aditya, whose last film,

Asha Jaoar Majhe

(Labour of Love) fetched him both nationa and international recognition.

The film has several personal references as Aditya drew a lot from his own memo ries. ���I was very close to my grandmother who passed away in 2010. My parents had told me how she came to see me at the hos pital when I was born. I spent my childhood with her and she would tell me stories of the World War, how Bengal was at that time and how her own parents were. When she took ill, I came down from Mumbai to be by her side. She was hospi talised during the Pujas and I had no clue she wouldn't come back. I would wonder what she was dreaming of when she was in coma. She passed away on Ekadashi and it was only six months later that her death hit me,��� said the director.

Though the cast is not locked yet, Aditya zeroed in on Lolita after auditioning several people. ���She liked the concept and I am happy that she gave her nod. Though I want to work with nonactors, the protagonist had to be well trained to pull off a difficult role like this,��� he said. While Mahendra Shetty of

Lootera

and Udaan fame will be doing the camera, putting the project together is Pondicherrybased Samir Sarkar, who line-produced Life of Pi and Namesake. The film will be on the floors in mid-December and Aditya plans to shoot entirely outside Bengal.