কেতু - KETU [New Bengali feature film] - Amartya Bhattacharyya | Priyanka Ghosh Roy | Kisaloy Roy 

Written, Directed, Shot and Edited by Amartya Bhattacharyya
Produced by Priyanka Ghosh Roy
Music/Sound Design by Kisaloy Roy
Award:
1. 'Burt Bacharach award for the best original soundtrack' at the CIVITELLA DEL TRONTO INTERNATIONAL IMAGO FILM FESTIVAL 2022
Official Selections:
1. Mosaic International South Asian Film Festival, Canada. (World Premiere)
2. Festival de Cine de Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz International Film Festival, Argentina)
3. Ciudad De Mexico International Film Festival, Mexico.
4. Ciudad del Este Independent Film Festival, Paraguay.
Logline :
‘Ketu’ is an intense psychedelic portrait of life in Isolation, as experienced due to the COVID 19 lockdown. The film shows a character, the filmmaker himself (who shoots himself as ‘selfie-cinematography’), trapped inside a small room.
Synopsis :
‘Ketu’ is a cosmic shadow, often referred to as an imaginary planet in Hindu astrology, which has deep impact on human lives. It represents consequence of all actions, good and bad. It causes material losses in order to force a more spiritual outlook in a person.
The film is an intense psychedelic portrait of life in Isolation, as experienced due to the COVID 19 lockdown. The film shows a character, the filmmaker himself (who shoots himself as ‘selfie-cinematography’), trapped inside a small room.
The entire film shows the character’s state of mind in the lockdown. His only interaction with the outside world is through his computer screen and a mobile. He often video-calls his girlfriend, who he has named ‘Mild Headache’ as seen in phone directory, and she seems to be a character of sorts. She amuses, yet keeps complaining about the lockdown.
The computer screen flashes up world news and political views. He listens to the Prime Minister of India urging people to light candles as the entire country feels helpless battling the Pandemic. Through the computer, he also reads about the terrible condition of Italy and USA. The pandemic reaches him, only through his computer, and in politicized fashion. Only the monotony is his reality.
Days pass by, dreams pass by, often overlapping each other as dreams and reality together gets entangled within a claustrophobic cycle under the lockdown, craving for freedom and hope. And the situation continues …
Director’s Statement :
For over three months, I was stuck inside a small room in the city of Bhubaneswar, as the entire country went under a lockdown due to the COVID 19 pandemic. There was no one to meet, and all my ongoing projects went on hold due to the situation. The space inside the room was the only character I could interact with, and it naturally brought out a creative urge to shoot and depict the space around me. The film features myself in that congested and untidy space, with an urge to break free, but circumstances were such that there was no scope.
The film is a fiction, yet a kind of a documentary which records the impact of the pandemic times. I have tried not to put information, but the spirit of the pandemic in this film. The claustrophobia, the dreams, or rather the nightmares, are my most intimate depiction of what I’ve been going through. Media is reporting on how the economy is destroyed, about the lives that are lost, and several other important things. We know the effects of this virus on our society, but we haven’t always seen its image on our own minds. My effort was to see and show the face of the pandemic as an individual mind perceives it, in horrifying solitude and forced inaction amidst a never-ending monotony of unprecedented life.
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