Filmmaker Ankita Gusain begins this visual letter to her unborn child when the fetus is six weeks and three days old, little more than a dark smudge on the ultrasound. The letter is about Gusain’s father, who suddenly disappeared when she was a small child. Just as suddenly, he reappeared years later, a changed man.
The letter is filmed in gently moving, beautifully composed black-and-white images, shot in the remote Himalayan mountain village where her father now lives. Through Gusain’s use of light, shadow, and camera angles, almost every shot is like a painting. In spoken and written commentary, she reflects on her father and gradually comes to new understandings of his disappearance and her own pain. Only at the end does color enter the film, in the form of the rare footage from a time when her childhood was still carefree and her father was still a father.
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