
Ashish Avikunthak
Director · b. 1972 · India
Ashish Avikunthak (February 11, 1972) is an Indian avant-garde filmmaker, film theorist, archaeologist and cultural anthropologist. He is considered to be an iconoclastic film artist who works outside Indian mainstream cinema. His films explore Indian philosophy and existentialism and are categorized by their use of unorthodox cinematography and editing. Avikunthak films are rooted in Indian religion, epistemology, ritual and form. ArtReview describes his works as: “Avikunthak's works insist on an Indian epistemology while utilising a rigorously formal visual language that is clearly aware of Western avant-garde practices such as those of Andrei Tarkovsky and Samuel Beckett. These are self-consciously difficult works that are filmed in a self-consciously beautiful way.”
Movies1
Movie7.0DocumentaryIn 1997, Ashish Avikunthak filmed a sequence -- a friend and artist, Girish Dahiwale, immersing an idol of Ganesha at Chowpati beach, Bombay on the last day of the Ganapati festival. A year later, he committed suicide. After twelve years, Avikunthak completed the film. Using his footage as the leitmotif, this film is a requiem to a dead friend, and metamorphosises into an “existential inquiry into the idea of death”.
Vakratunda Swaha
2010 · 2 votes