Film | DEVASTATED (2024)

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DCP| 2024 | Ashish Avikunthak | Germany, India| 86 minutes| Bangla Free admission. No registration required. Followed by Q&A with director Ashish Avikunthak and Executive producer/cast member Debleena Sen In confrontational conversations with his wife and his lover, a middle-aged Indian policeman opens up about his work as a ‘sacrificial assistant’, a state-designated agent tasked with extra-judicial killings of Muslim men. Elsewhere in the city, Lord Krishna and the prince Arjuna enact a dialogue from the Bhagavad Gita. Paralysed into inaction during battle by human considerations, Arjuna seeks the counsel of Krishna, who instructs him on the moral duty of a warrior. “Morality and mortality preoccupy Ashish Avikunthak, as do religiosity and spirituality, temporality and spatiality, and a host of other metaphysical concerns. The iconoclast filmmaker has been exploring the dualities and varying hues of these themes in his cinema for over a quarter century. His 15th film, Vidhvastha (Devastated)…Avikunthak deconstructs his preoccupations and much more through characters engaged in dialectics.” - ArtReview, 2024 “Despite its formal aggression and the apparent opacity of its ideas, Avikunthak’s tough, disturbing film may also be his most accessible undertaking to date, not least because it stares the beast straight in the eye. A work directly responding to the time and place it issues from, “Devastated” dares to probe the unsavoury recesses of India’s scarred collective psyche.” - International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2024 “While “Devastated” is certainly not an easy watch, there is no denying its impact on the viewer. Director Ashish Avikunthak has created a provocative, often uncomfortable feature about how people get away with murder within a system allowing it.” - Asian Movie Pluse, 2024 “Violence as an institutional apparatus is regularly depicted in new Indian releases, glorified through the performances of superstars who don the uniforms of police…

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