Aamis

Nirmali, a married Paediatrician in her late 30s, leads a peaceful but lonely domestic existence in Guwahati, Assam. Her husband, a senior Doctor, spends most of his time doing relief work in surrounding areas, leaving her to take care of their son. One day, she meets Sumon, a young PhD student researching food habits in northeastern India, who warms up to her in a manner she seems unaccustomed to. Suman’s work exposes him to the belief that there’s no kind of food that can be considered abnormal and Nirmali is drawn to this idea. The two soon discover that they have a shared love for food – specifically, meat. Together, they bond over meals comprising unusual meats on platonic dates, although Suman longs for some sort of physical contact. As Nirmali’s taste buds grow more adventurous, their relationship takes a dark and bizarre turn neither had anticipated.

Director

Bhaskar’s debut film Kothanodi (2015) received the Post Production Grant from Asian Cinema Fund and had its World Premiere at Busan International Film Festival 2015. Kothanodi has since travelled to festivals such as BFI London Film Festival, Jio MAMI Film Festival, Goteborg Film Festival and IFFLA amongst many others. Kothanodi also received the National Award for Best Film in Assamese, 2016.

Aamis, Bhaskar’s second feature film, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2019 in the International Narrative Competition section. Previously, Aamis was selected for the 2017 Asian Cinema Fund’s Co-Production Market in Busan and the 2017 NFDC Film Bazaar Co-Production Market in Goa.

Director’s Note: Love is one of the central pillars that hold up the experience of being human. Yet who you can love is limited by a bewildering range of boundaries – of class, caste, religion, age, institutions, and even nationality and gender. Entire belief systems have been built around codifying and proscribing who can love whom. Certain kinds of love are illicit; they are taboo. But, as the saying goes – “Love isn’t something you find, it is something that finds you.” Aamis tells the story of two people whom love finds, and yet, with too many boundaries between them for love to find fruition, it degenerates into self-destruction.

The film explores the curious relationship between food and sex, referenced widely in popular culture as being interchangeable. In Aamis, because the characters are repressing the natural urge to express their love physically, it is deflected into an almost unconscious (but ravenous) desire to eat meat, preferably together. This relationship is stretched to its extreme in the film. While the film is set in a contemporary developing city, the story of Aamis could have unfolded anywhere in the world. The principle ingredients that enable Nirmali and Sumon to fall in love – urban anonymity, access to diverse public eateries, instant messaging apps, etc – are common features in every city be it in Asia, Europe or the Americas.

The other subtext in the script is a cold nihilist streak that suggests given a set of all options, all of them lead to the same bad choices, and that life is eventually meaningless.

Aamis has been designed to provoke, not shock. At its core, the film is not designed to carry any message more than one of empathy for people who make terrible choices in the pursuit of love. Aamis is envisaged as being an immersive experience for audiences, where they slip into and walk in the lovers’ shoes, and feel what they are going through.