Ghost of the Golden Groves – Virtual Screening

In an unknown dystopian era in the near future the forest is an intelligent being that goes back to the past to set things right. It deals with our two protagonists in dynamically opposite ways.

Pomotho is a city-bred survey officer visiting ‘Shonajhuri’ forest to develop roads. The pedestrian Promotho represents machinery and industrialization and after a bizarre set of encounters meets a sudden death.

In comes Bibhuti- uneducated but imaginative, poor but full of hope who lands a job in the same forest area. He also experiences strange incidents but only to have his perspective widened.

The experiences and final outcome of both are cleverly orchestrated by the forest in an attempt to uproot the seeds of dystopia; the time is post world war II, the latter being an important catalyst of the former.

A story of two protagonists who never meet – at least not in the dimension we’re aware of!

“Filmmaking is like dreaming in the sense of the collective unconscious which is shaped by archetypes. Our intent was to deconstruct such archetypes through film. In another sense, the entire film has a dream-like attribute with a purposefully elusive narrative to depict our age of hyper-reality where truth is simulated, often ironically, through the audio visual medium itself by acting as a simulacrum and blurring the lines between reality and fiction. We can sense this more prominently in this Covid scenario where one seems to have a physical sensation of dreaming it all. We don’t mean this in the sense of “oh my God, the Covid situation is a nightmare” but a very lucid dream.” – Aniket Dutta and Roshni Sen

YEAR  2019 RUNTIME 98 minutes LANGUAGE Bengali COUNTRY India PREMIERE Chicago Premiere

FILMMAKER Aniket Dutta, Roshni Sen