Amrtāh: The Author of Time

“This project is an admirable effort to reimagine the transmission of the Upanishads in the post-colonial age. I am sure that those who have an appreciation for the spiritual journey will find this film resonates deeply, and those who appreciate art but not necessarily the spiritual journey will be able to experience some of the images that were common to people nearly 3,000 years ago - that helped them transcend the cycles of happiness and disappointment that afflict us all.”

Brahmachari V. Sharan, Ph.D.
Director for Dharmic Life, Georgetown University, USA

Amrtāh: the author of time, is an experimental and personal cinematic expression of some enduring conversations on the ‘individual’ and the ‘Eternal’, as wisdom culled from the knowledge ocean of the Upanishads. Celebrated as a fountain-head of Indian thought, the Upanishads, are an interactive amalgamation of centuries of meditative contemplation on spiritualism and existence, life and living; featuring some of humanity’s earliest philosophical enquires into the world and beyond. The film is a renewed engagement with some of those timeless questions, seeking personal answers in the pages of a life diary, vignettes of a photo album, collage of earth sounds and abstract nature videos in true spirit of cinema verité. It is about mindful internal dialogues triggered by mundane external encounters with faith, belief, logic; and more.

Philosophical insights, are not limited to any geography’s natural gifts or a civilization’s thought exclusivities. Shot over five years across 100 locations in Asia and Europe, the film’s scenes, share – life notes from the East and the West, imagined as 25 plus scenarios, each of which, an independent short film in itself, could have appeared anywhere in its rainbow of conversations between Purusa (the gender indeterminate Soul Self) and Prakriti (nature). The narrative is envisioned to challenge conventional cinematic notions on beauty, continuity, characters, genre, editing, performance and meaning creation through the movie idiom.

Amrtāh has many characters – humans, animals, birds, bees, trees, rivers, mountains, natural creations and man-made constructions; but it is not protagonist free. A child, curious and content, appears at intermittent moments in the film’s journey to offer fleeting assurances of unity and continuity. The child wanders in and out of the narrative, exploring and experiencing; which in a way, also represent, the only ambitions, driving the film’s making – to explore and experience.

The Upanishads view the empirical world as an illusion, Maya. It is a temporary dwelling for every this and that, the animate and the inanimate, the seen, the unseen and the beyond. And ‘Nothing’! In Amrtāh, you get to see every this and that, which has come to shape our ideas about a film’s form today in its century-plus lifetime – still and moving images; simple drawings and exquisite mise-en-scène; distant conversations and grand dialogues; background noise and created music; sumptuously edited videos lingering amidst untreated, uncorrected camera recordings, captured as it is. The film’s melange of form and content, realities and imagination, truth and interpretations of ‘the personal within the universal’ – offer its maker’s experiencing of the seen, with a hoped for felt encountering in the viewer – also of the unseen!