Arunava Gangopadhyay

On a wintery morning in Kolkata, five people who leave office at midnight, take a cab to return home. During the course of the journey, they narrate stories of supernatural events, stories of spooky events they experienced, and stories that go beyond the mundane corporate life. As their journey nears the end, they realize that they have just had a journey of a lifetime.

What is Bangla kalpavigyan? Is there such a thing as Bangla Science Fiction? Is there such a thing as Indian SF? This is our journey with the genre, captured and presented like never before in film. Beginning with the early work of writers such as Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain (Begum Rokeya) and the speculative mode in Bengal, and ending with the pioneering webzine Kalpabiswa, the film traces the historical arc of kalpavigyan over a century of the genre. From the genre magazines of the 1960s-80s and the writers and editors who ignited the movement by giving it shape and form, the film presents a series of conversations and critical reflections from researchers and scholars who have worked with the genre both in relation to Bengal and kalpavigyan as well as the wider phenomenon of SF.

A solitary young woman living with her dog becomes the target of neighbourhood slander. Her sudden suicide—and the earlier discovery of a dead foetus—fuels harsher speculation. Two neighbouring families, a young couple and an elderly father with his bedridden daughter, confront their own fears while discussing her fate. Her ambiguous life and death expose a society quick to judge independent women yet capable of rare empathy.