Film | DEVASTATED (2023)

DCP| 2023 | Ashish Avikunthak | India, Germany| 86 minutes| Bengali Free admission. No registration required. 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 officers and embark on missions to ensure national security. Avikunthak’s reconfiguration of this spectacle is not only fascinating but also exigent, delving deep into the horrifying impact of a system that is designed to indoctrinate and exterminate.” Far Out, 2024 About the FIlmmaker: Ashish Avikunthak is a filmmaker, cultural anthropologist, and archaeologist whose work is widely recognized for its philosophical depth, formal rigor, and sustained engagement with ritual, temporality, and Indian epistemologies. Since the mid-1990s, his films have been screened and exhibited at leading international institutions and festivals, including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, the Berlinale, and the film festivals of London, Locarno, and Rotterdam. His oeuvre has recently been the subject of the edited volume The Epistemic Archaeology of Ashish Avikunthak: Cinema and Religiosity of Everyday Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), which examines the intellectual and cinematic significance of his work. He is also the author of Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and the Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Currently, he serves as Professor of Film/Media at The Harrington School of Communication and Media, University of Rhode Island. Co-sponsored by Film and Media Studies Program and the South Asian Studies Council