National Award-winning filmmakers Sarmistha Maity and Rajdeep Paul talk about their debut feature ‘Kalkokkho’

The Bengali film, which premiered at the prestigious Busan International Film Festival 2021, is an existential horror inspired from the pandemic

In the beginning of 2020, Bengali filmmakers Rajdeep Paul and Sarmistha Maity were planning to start their debut feature — a social realism film that wanted to explore the underbelly of Calcutta (the makers, deliberately or otherwise, do not say Kolkata). It was supposed to be set in the streets of the city. Then, COVID-19 shut India and their film down.

Rajdeep and Sarmistha, both alumni of Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, are not first-timers to films. They have, in fact, won a National Award for their short, At the Cross Roads : Nondon Bagchi Life and Living. But directing a feature length film was special to them. 

“When COVID struck, we could not go out. We waited week after week. But we didn’t know when it would end,” says Rajdeep, “We were uncertain if we could make films at all or could at least step out of our houses. Even the stories we thought of weren’t good enough.”

The duo was stranded, creatively and literally. Then, Rajdeep chanced upon a news story about a woman in Kolkata. “Her relatives were taken away for quarantine and she couldn’t even contact them. And there were a lot of people like her,” he says. 

The next morning, he had this germ of an idea: ‘What if a person, in this state of anxiety, kidnaps a doctor?’

This grew into Kalkokkho, a complex sci-fi, existential horror story in the backdrop of a pandemic. The makers say the film was their reflection of what unfolded in front of them.

“During the pandemic, we were simultaneously experiencing a weird state of anxiety and boredom,” says Rajdeep, “What seemed surreal suddenly became our reality. We could see humans showing extreme apathy as well as extreme empathy. We were asked to go out just for the essentials. So, we asked ourselves ‘What is essential in life? Is it just buying groceries?’ My father passed away during the pandemic. And, he was going through depression because of the lockdown. We wanted to explore these things in our film.”