Counterfeit Kunkoo
Reema Sengupta
India. 2017. 14 min

Reema Sengupta’s film is India’s only short film entry at Sundance Film Festival in 15 years.

Counterfeit Kunkoo is unpretentious and realistic to its core. The film is about a separated single woman looking for accommodation in Mumbai and minces no words (or visuals) in underlining the desperation of her situation. With a satirical bent, the film showcases how women in India, even today, are expected to be accompanied by a man for finding a roof over their head. Says director Reema Sengupta, who wrote the film a few years back when her father asked her mother to find her own place after 24 years of marriage: “The idea was to address housing discrimination and the shift of attitude towards a woman after she decides to separate from an abusive marriage. I didn’t know how to channelise the deep sense of anger and helplessness I was feeling. So I chose to write a film about it.”