Yearning for motherhood and at a critical point in her IVF fertility treatment, Tara, a young queer woman, returns from her life in the US to India to attend her father’s funeral. As the shadow of the paterfamilias still looms large, she must navigate fragile remnants of daughterhood and shades of unrequited love within spaces she once called home.
Multi-time IFFLA alum Aditi Vasudev (Anita, Tara Versus, Sulemani Keeda) delivers a mesmerizing lived-in performance, embodying the full breadth of Tara’s power and vulnerability, while arresting cinematography within a covid-infested world eerily amplifies the precarity of her interior landscape. Sushma Khadepaun’s (Anita, IFFLA 2021) humanist lens and superb storytelling masterfully capture the taut liminal space within which a self-assured and memorable heroine must reconcile the place she carries as the daughter of others, while upholding her own version of adulthood. This is what visionary and utterly compelling cinema looks like.
Content Advisory: Themes of homophobia
Sushma Khadepaun
Sushma Khadepaun is an Indian-born writer and director based in New York. Khadepaun’s work has been featured on Filmmaker Magazine 2021’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” NPR’s Weekend Edition, BOMB Magazine, Focus Features, and Canal Plus, among others. Khadepaun’s short film Anita premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival and went on to screen at several international festivals. She is a recipient of SFFilm’s Westridge Grant and a fellow at Film Independent, Gotham Week. She has recently been selected to the 2023 Film at Lincoln Center’s Artist Academy. Khadepaun is currently in development with her first feature film, Anita.
