Carnival is a no-budget, independent and a personal film, which experiments with contrasting themes (love and death), cinematic forms (fiction and documentary), actors (popular and unpopular), and real (unknown) people; along with formal excesses and stasis, by using loud sounds, noises and stretches of silence, as well as by juxtaposing moving images with stills, shot in color and black-white. The thin plot line of the film involves Babu who has returned to Kolkata from ‘somewhere’ during the Durga Puja holidays, after the sudden, or somewhat expected, demise of his ailing mother. Mother’s letter and the descriptions of her rotting state float on the skin of the film, and repeatedly come back to consume Babu’s sense of plenitude. The city has transformed in many ways, from the time Babu had left. Unknown dwellings are the new signs of the city. High-rises, flyovers, unfinished flyovers, buildings under constructions, ‘pandals’ that engulf houses; by and large a heterortopic cityscape with housing complexes, cemetery, theatres, brothels, and fairgrounds. The film premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.