Shruti Ghosh

Ghya-chang-fou literally means 'suddenly beheading' in Bengali. it features thirteen unnamed people gathering in a mansion filled with archaic objects to celebrate what appears to be a communist revolution. Nothing seems real, roads open up to improbable places, places lead to impossible elevators, elevators lift people to unconvincing roads. Bacchanalian spirit steadily overtakes the initial deadpan seriousness. The encore of celebration sounds delusionary as the drunken conversation about communism, about its methods and means, about it intricate turns through history degenerates to bourgeois nonsense and decadence leading to absurd rifts, comic conflicts, unleashed orgies and debauchery.

A solitary young woman living with her dog becomes the target of neighbourhood slander. Her sudden suicide—and the earlier discovery of a dead foetus—fuels harsher speculation. Two neighbouring families, a young couple and an elderly father with his bedridden daughter, confront their own fears while discussing her fate. Her ambiguous life and death expose a society quick to judge independent women yet capable of rare empathy.

At midnight on his 10th birthday, a boy scours the lesser-known Kolkata streets in search of a father he’s never met, carrying a letter he can’t read.