SYNOPSIS
When a recent widow moves to New Zealand from India, she’s forced to confront her grief by completing an ordinary ritual in an extraordinary circumstance: quarantine.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Like most writers, I was taught to “write what you know.” Admittedly, I do not know what it is like to be a 57-year old widow, especially one that processes her grief with an ancient ritual while trapped in a hotel room in a foreign country.
But I do know what it is like to grieve the sudden absence of a partner, to move countries in both uncertainty and isolation, and to be forced to confront my own self by silence.
I was experiencing all three of those things in 2020, having just escaped an India overrun by COVID and about to enter a New Zealand that remained unstirred. I wanted to tell a story set in this space of transition, but ambivalent about whose perspective to tell it from.
In a writer’s cliché of sorts, I fell sick on my third day and had a fever dream: my mother, struggling while moving countries without the company and spirit of my father. A pit in my stomach told me the worst had happened. I knew then that it had to be a story of her grief, torn between two countries.
It was only fitting, then, that the film was completed over two years with support from both New Zealand and India crew, finishing its journey of immigration as I finished mine. Not only does it constitute all that I knew of loss, it has left me knowing so much more.