Bollywood: Kalki Koechlin and Kalki Koechlin star in film on dementia ‘Goldfish’

Indian actresses Kalki Koechlin and Deepti Naval will star in the upcoming film ‘Goldfish’, directed by cinematographer Pushan Kripalani. The film will explore the subject of dementia.

The film follows the story of Anamika, a half-Indian half-English woman, who returns home to the UK to deal with her mother’s dementia and the scars of her childhood.

“It’s very difficult to make independent cinema, as it does not get funded easily and so it’s taken me this long to get to make this film. I feel that dealing with larger questions is only possible by examining the smaller parts of human relationships. I feel that my job is to further the human conversation and this was a wonderful way to attempt to do that,” Kripalani told Variety.

Kripalani is returning to the director’s chair seven years after his acclaimed directorial debut ‘The Threshold’.

“Dementia is also going to be one of the greatest concerns in the next decade or two. I think everybody will soon have if they haven’t already had a contact with someone with this condition,” Kripalani added.

As per Variety, the cast also includes Gordon Warnecke, Rajit Kapur and Bharti Patel.

Naval told Variety: “It didn’t take me much to research for this role because I’ve known somebody with dementia — it is part of my personal experience. I’ve known someone close to me suffering from dementia. So when I read the role, I thought here’s my chance to interpret something that I’ve known closely.”

She added: “Dementia is a very common condition of old age. So it’s not something rare or out of the ordinary — we see it all around”.

“It is something we’ve known in the elderly people around us, it’s not something hard to imagine. It’s from observing life around us. It’s from knowing the elderly in our family and knowing how their behaviour patterns could vary from us,” she added further.