film detail

Synopsis:

East Coast Premiere with red carpet from 4:30 PM at SVA Theatre, 333 W 23rd St, New York, NY 10011

Anamika Fields is the daughter of an Englishman and an Indian woman. Her mother, Sadhana Tripathi, left behind a career as a Hindustani classical vocalist of great promise to marry her father and move to the UK. Her father died when Anamika was ten. It left Sadhana, who never wanted to be a parent, who never wanted to live in the UK, to bring up her only daughter.
Twenty-five years later, Sadhana is suffering from the onset of dementia. This situation is exacerbated by Sadhana’s deep-seated reluctance to leave the house she has worked so hard for, Ana’s own precarious financial and professional circumstances, and the astronomical cost of specialized care in a society that would just rather forget their elderly.
Ana thinks that she will resolve the situation in a few short days. Instead, she is drawn deeper and deeper into Sadhana’s life and its strange little peculiarities – a best friend who is also her worst enemy, a married lover, a musical apprentice, and a fox who swings by the garden on occasional evenings.
Ana is also constantly surprised by the depth and strangeness of the disease itself – the fear and the violence, of how memory lets go of the immediate and clings to the smallest hurt from decades ago, of how the best and the worst of a personality seems to rise to the surface, and how hard sufferers try to conceal their constant struggle to function.
Ana will also be forced to confront her own choices – of love, and work, and of how far she is willing to go to do what she thinks is the right thing. She will encounter the choices that the generation before her made, to claim a little piece of the world as their own.
Mother and daughter, strangers for over a decade, find themselves thrown together once again after all this time. This has always been a difficult, damaging relationship. Some of it was a by-product of their circumstance. And some of it was absolutely deliberate.
Anamika is forced to become several things, all at once: she is daughter and mother, care-giver and secretary and detective, shield and scalpel. Around her, in the neighborhood she escaped, Anamika begins to discover a woman she never knew at home, alive in memory, in anecdote, in music she doesn’t understand.

Movie will be followed by Q & A with Kalki Koechlin and Pushan Kripalani
 

Pushan Kripalani is a cinematographer and director. His first film, The Threshold [2015], was acclaimed in its short festival run, garnering praise at MAMI and the NFDC Film Bazaar and winning Best Actor and Best Actress at the New York Indian Film Festival. It screened on Channel 4 in the UK and is currently streaming on Disney+Hotstar. As cinematographer, he has filmed several features, as well as ads, documentaries and shorts, working with Shyam Benegal, Ram Madhvani and Zafar Hai, amongst others, as well as for National Geographic, Discovery and the BBC. He is a founder member of the industrial theatre co. He has worked on over thirty productions for the stage and for radio, in capacities ranging from director to actor to designer, musician and producer. Goldfish is his second feature.