Poster photograph shot in Egham, England.
Film Festivals
FINALIST
Bi-Monthly Competition September - October 2023,
Mindfield Film Festival, Albuquerque,
New York City Aphrodite Film Awards, 2023
OFFICIAL SELECTIONS
Luleå International Film Festival, October 2023
Stockholm City Film Festival, October 2023
Cine Paris Film Festival, 2023
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
Salt House Creative International Film Festival, Sydney, Season 23
Screenings 2023
Alliance Française de Bangalore | 14 July
Atta Galatta | 16 December
Cadmium Hollow / fiction / 83 minutes / black/white / English / 1:33:1
Storytelling - through film, can be viewed as a collection of moments, each reflective of a larger disaffectedness. Imprints of time and space. Worlds.
Such films are often illustrative of irrevocable existentiality and detachedness and find themselves navigating a realm outside the idea of cinema. A movie, in its purest form, is a stage for display and sentiment. An obliteration of reality from reality. However, a film can be an expansion of the real. It could be a place where characters bleat and lament, happily and helplessly like they do on earth. A film need not be but a mere story, but a landmark in human existence. Like a novel.
Cadmium Hollow is a preamble to that world. The film follows a day in the life of an artist. We see him making a painting for the girl he adores as she prepares to leave the city for good. Over the course of the film, we meet friends and strangers who appear to have reached a punctuation in their lives. The film is about suburbia and the claustrophobia faced by people whose qualities could never align with the demands of the mainstream world. It is a muse about relationships, abstraction in art, memory and belonging. The film also bears witness to the evolution of a painting; and includes several original literary pieces often written and recited by its characters.
Prologue
The Prologue is a prequel to Cadmium Hollow. It follows a character from the story and is narrated by the film's protagonist. The prologue acts like an introduction, similar to that of a novel, and sets up the world of the film.
Cadmium Hollow / Prologue / fiction / 12 mins 25 seconds / black/white / English / 1:33:1
Narration
Winter mornings were still. Like propaganda, they were ideal yet fleeting. Soon the city would go back to its preferred state. A murmur of summery breath beneath the blossomy breeze. She lay motionless in bed, her lungs filling and emptying beneath the forbidding ceiling. A strange, unending drone captured the world, and pulsed within each layer of every minute – turning everything in sight into a lucid sound. Time was a carcass. A metallic tunnel beneath an airport that ran from one end of the world to the other end of the world. And when at last she stirred, the winds whittled something of her sorrow within the isles and shanties of the hollow suburb.
Still, still, still,
it repeated itself, in plutonic colours of delusions and languages. She sat up and waited, like a bottle of cadmium white faith. Her life seemed to be a long and silent gaze towards silken skies and salted lands, through different latticed windows at different times on different earths. It was a tiresome attempt to piece each world together. And useless to moan for a little boat at the cracked heart of a pinched desert. She got up to wash her face. Sleep eluded her with the slightest of dreams, and she would often roll out of bed to go in search of them. She splashed hurriedly, as though to wash her face off completely and replace it with careful brushstrokes and auburn shades. Then she sighed, looking at herself. Today would be another picnic in her lagoon of pigmented desires.
