The Dawn He Never Saw: Zubeen Garg's Last Film 'Roi Roi Binale' Becomes a Farewell Movement

It’s 4 am in Guwahati. The city is cloaked in darkness, the first light still an hour away, the air drenched with rain. Banker Pranamika Kalita and her husband drive through the quiet streets to Beltola’s Matrix Cinemas, five kilometres from home, for the first-day-first-show of Roi Roi Binale. Released posthumously on October 31, this is Zubeen Garg’s final film, one he wrote, scored and starred in. 

“We’ve never watched a movie at this hour,” Kalita says, smiling through disbelief, “but this isn’t just any movie.” Outside the still-shuttered mall that houses the theatre, a crowd has already gathered. Someone starts singing Mayabini Ratir Bukut – the haunting melody that has come to define Assam’s collective mourning – and within moments, dozens of voices rise with his, cutting through the dawn. It feels unreal, electric, almost sacred. “This is the kind of moment only Zubeen Da could have inspired,” Kalita says. 

When the film ends almost three hours later, the euphoria gives way to silence. She steps out, her eyes moist, like everyone else’s, and is handed a small sapling by cinema staff – a living tribute to the artist who loved plants. Cradling it gently, she walks out into the morning light, carrying with her the quiet weight of farewell.

A movement beyond Assam

What unfolded that morning in Guwahati is being mirrored across the country. Since Roi Roi Binale released, packed houses have been the norm not just in Assam but in more than 45 cities across India. From Guwahati to Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata – and even in places that rarely feature on the Assamese diaspora circuit, like Kochi, Ahmedabad, Indore, Patna, Lucknow, Ranchi, Jaipur and Goa – the film has redrawn the map for regional cinema, carrying Zubeen Garg’s voice into territories an Assamese film had never reached before.

“We had expected a good turnout, but this has gone far beyond anything we imagined,” says Shyamantak Gautam, co-producer of the film. “In Guwahati, theatres began competing to host the earliest show possible first 6 am, then 5.30, then 5, 4.30, and finally 4.25 am. That dawn show sold out in under 20 minutes.”

Zubeen Garg in the poster of 'Roi Roi Binale'. Photo arranged by the author.

Across the Northeast, the film released on 91 screens, including 85 in Assam, running over 585 daily shows through the week. In Guwahati alone, two PVR theatres ran a record-breaking 23 shows on the first day, while several long-defunct single screen theatres including Ganesh Talkies, which Garg had wanted to revive, reopened after years just for this film.

Even in other cities, tickets vanished within hours of advance bookings opening a week earlier. Theatres scrambled to add more shows, more screens, more halls. Bengaluru-based strategy consultant and lifelong Garg fan, Kundal Mahanta, was dismayed to find every first-day show sold out.

“I even considered flying to Chennai or Kochi just to catch the film on the first day,” he says. “I kept refreshing the ticketing apps all day when advance bookings opened. By evening, they’d added more screens in Bengaluru, and I finally managed to grab a ticket for the last show of the day.”

For Mahanta, watching Zubeen on screen felt like being in his presence one last time. “It was a bittersweet journey of joy and grief – knowing we’ll never see him again, yet feeling him so close. For Assamese cinema, this isn’t just a release; it’s a movement.”

When the music stopped

Zubeen, who died in a freak swimming accident in Singapore just over a month ago, left behind a void that runs deep across Assam. Across three decades, he recorded more than 38,000 songs in over 40 languages, directed, wrote and acted in numerous films, and threw himself into causes ranging from river conservation to mental health awareness. His funeral drew millions, making it the largest such gathering anywhere in the world after Queen Elizabeth II’s, and the second largest for a musician after Michael Jackson.

His death also ignited the #JusticeForZubeen movement, with fans demanding a deeper probe into the circumstances surrounding it. Under mounting public pressure, authorities made several arrests in the past month, and the investigation remains ongoing. Meanwhile, fans still gather at the site of his cremation near Guwahati, at all times of day and night, offering prayers, flowers, songs and tears. In the weeks since his passing, Assam has turned mourning into movement – and Roi Roi Binale, his last film, has become its vessel.

The goodbye he wrote himself

At its core, Roi Roi Binale is a story of friendship, love and longing, told through the pulse of music. Zubeen plays a blind singer whose defiance and vulnerability mirror the man himself. His mannerisms, half-smile, even the throwaway lines – many lifted from his real-life stage banter and interviews – blur the line between fiction and memory. The philosophy running through it feels unmistakably Zubeen: live with passion, love without fear, and stay true to your art even when the world misunderstands it.

The story itself isn’t new, but its honesty cuts through. Every actor around him performs with restraint; no character feels ornamental. The film’s rhythm, both literal and emotional, rests on its music. Each song plays like a chapter in his journey, a reminder of how deeply melody and meaning were entwined in his art. The choreography of the title track, Roi Roi Binale – a reimagining of Zubeen’s own 1998 song – is grand and layered with nostalgia, shot with the kind of sweep rarely seen in Assamese cinema. The original song, dark and introspective, had once puzzled listeners. That very reaction, his team later said, inspired him to build an entire film around it.

What lingers most is how eerily prophetic the film feels. A monologue on mortality, his love for the sea, his wish for a swim – now play like echoes of his own final days, as if he’d already written his goodbye. Watching it, the audience can’t help but feel he knew what was coming.

Completing the film after Zubeen’s sudden death was an emotional and logistical test for the entire team. “Two major challenges arose,” says co-producer Gautam. “The background score and parts of the dubbing were unfinished. Zubeen da had planned to begin the score right after returning from Singapore, but he passed away before that.”

The team then made a crucial decision to bring in Poran Borkatoky, one of Zubeen’s proteges and a musician deeply shaped by his sound, to compose the remaining score. “The goal was to make it feel entirely his – every note had to carry his spirit,” Gautam adds. Working almost round the clock, they completed the entire score in just six days.

But the hardest task was preserving Zubeen’s voice. “Some parts of the dubbing remained incomplete, forcing the team to improvise with care. We cleaned and restored on-set audio where possible and used AI-assisted techniques to reconstruct his voice for the missing bits. Specialist sound engineers from Mumbai worked alongside AI experts to achieve a near-identical tone and timbre. Every decision was made by asking, ‘What would Zubeen da have wanted?’” says Gautam. Their persistence paid off and the film was ready just in time for the date Zubeen had personally chosen for its release.

The legend of Zubeen Da

Watching Roi Roi Binale today feels like witnessing Zubeen write his own final act. The film’s release, despite everything that stood in its way, has become a collective act of love and defiance. It’s proof of how deeply his spirit runs through Assam’s cultural bloodstream.

To understand why, you have to understand the man himself. Zubeen wasn’t just a singer or an actor – he was a collective emotion. For over three decades, his voice was everywhere in Assam: blaring from roadside tea stalls, echoing through Bihu manchas and Durga Puja pandals, college festivals, protest rallies, and wedding processions alike. His songs cut across language, class, and generation, uniting people who otherwise agreed on little.

Born in Meghalaya’s Tura and raised in Jorhat, Upper Assam, Zubeen grew up steeped in both folk and devotional music. But his genius lay in how he broke those boundaries, fusing Bihu rhythms with rock, love ballads with protest anthems, and slipping between languages with the ease of someone who saw art as borderless. His breakout album Anamika in the early ’90s turned him into a youth icon overnight, while his Bollywood hit Ya Ali from Gangster made him briefly, reluctantly, famous across India.

Yet national fame never really interested him. He was fiercely rooted in Assam, using his platform to speak up for environmental causes, regional cinema, and mental health. He donated generously and adopted 15 underprivileged children with his wife, Garima Saikia. Zubeen could be mercurial and outspoken, often clashing with politicians, but that only added to his mystique. Declaring himself as a social leftist, he’d famously say, “Mur kunu jati nai, mur kunu dharma nai, mur kunu bhagawan nai, moi mukto,” translating to “I have no caste, no religion, no god, I am free.” 

To his fans though, he wasn’t a distant celebrity – he was one of them, flawed and fearless, someone who lived exactly as he sang, with all heart and no restraint. I grew up in Assam in the 1990s, when insurgency and uncertainty were part of everyday life. Back then, Zubeen’s voice carried something we didn’t even realise we were searching for – hope. His songs turned the noise of conflict into the rhythm of belonging, teaching an entire generation to look beyond fear and believe in love, in music, in the promise of a gentler tomorrow.

Zubeen lived with the urgency of someone who knew time was short. What Roi Roi Binale leaves behind, beyond its story of friendship, love and music, is an echo of that restless energy. In a way, the film completes the circle – his life feeding his art, and now his art preserving his life.

Satarupa Paul is an independent journalist.

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