What Remains

In What Remains, a short film by Chitra Ganesh and Sarita Khurana, a woman returns to her childhood home, and discovers far more than she is prepared for: jettisoned and repressed elements of her prior self, in the form of a young ghost.  As in many supernatural narratives, the ghost holds on to prior trauma that keeps her bound to the human world.  Also known as “intelligent hauntings,” such ghosts remain in a limbo state, haunting the scene of death or places that were meaningful to them in life.  They are, on some level, aware of the living and react to being seen on the occasions that they materialize. Inspired by the experimental narratives films of Maya Deren and 1960s and 70s Bollywood cinema and song, What Remains combines  Chitra Ganesh’s and Sarita Khurana’s visual and narrative styles, drawing upon shared interests in memory, subjectivity, and psychic trauma.

Unresolved or unacknowledged, such traumatic experience transforms into memories that linger at and haunt the edges of our adult lives.  These ghosts inside us persist, and ultimately need to be set free. We use the conventions of film and supernatural storytelling to give a material form to the process of confronting unresolved psychic material floating at the margins of everyday adult life.