Nest (Asmita Pal) India |

Nest
Asmita Pal
India. 2025. 21 min

On an ordinary morning that transforms drastically, a young girl moves through the rhythms of her home. Her mother, an ornithologist who traded fieldwork for domesticity, is restless in ways the girl can sense but not name. As the day unfolds in arguments behind closed doors, in the steadying presence of the family maid, in the sudden visit of a bird to her mother’s room the girl watches the world she knows begin to shift. By evening, something has been irrevocably lost.

ASMITA PAL

Asmita is a filmmaker studying at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata. Her work is rooted in the personal and the observational and she is drawn to quiet domestic worlds, the inner lives of women, and the natural textures of everyday life. She grew up in the Gariahat neighbourhood of Kolkata, and the houses, sounds, and rhythms of that childhood continue to find their way into her films. This is her second short film.

DIRECTOR´S NOTE

This film lives in the peripheral vision of a child in what she half-hears, half-understands, and tries to fix with the small tools available to her. A feather. A gesture. A question asked in the dark. I was drawn to how the same house that holds a woman who has become stagnant can also hold a girl who is becoming. The mother’s story is one of thwarted identity, but the film never quite belongs to her. It belongs to the daughter, who is old enough to feel the weight of adult unhappiness but too young to carry it correctly.

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