Broken Chord, a short fiction film that I made as part of the third semester at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.
Please click on the link below, if the video doesn't play.
Link: https://youtu.be/mJzGpt96F2I
Concept
What will happen if one day you are not allowed to express yourself anymore? You are told that expressing yourself is a symptom of a sickness? The cure is living in a total state of inactivity. How will a woman react to such a state of confinement? What will be her options? What will be her conflicts? How will she deal with the familiarity of her identity which she is no longer allowed to embrace and experience? How will her emotional chaos manifest itself? Will that be the state of madness? Is that how women are driven “mad” in the social context? Will she embrace madness? Will she resist it? Is that the only way to find some sort of sanity, some sort of identity, some sort of expression?
Inspired from The Yellow Wallpaper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrative of the film is linear and charts the emotional journey of the protagonist Maya after she has been diagnosed with nervous anxiety which is commonly called a woman’s disease and confined by the rest cure.
Set in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the nucleus of the film follows the character Maya. Her husband, a doctor who has recently started to practice, has diagnosed her as a patient of postpartum depression or nervous anxiety. The cure: REST. She is not allowed to do anything, she has to live in a total state of inactivity. She can’t write, she can’t read, she can’t hum, and she can’t even tap her feet. She should not think about her condition and absolutely not give into flights of fancy.
Festival Screenings
Official Selection, Vibgyor Film Festival 2016, Kerela, India
Official Selection, Focus Category, 9th International Documentary And Short Film Festival 2016, Kerela, India
Selected In The Category – Nid Film And Video Retrospective – Alpavirama Asian Short And Documentary Film Festival, 2016
Official Selection, 18th Madurai International Documentary and Short Film Festival, 2016
