Un(ravel)

As coming-of-age shorts go, they don’t get much more contemplative than this, as writer/director Siddharth Sinha weaves together a story of a boy (Alok Rajwade) as he goes about his daily business.

At school, he’s bored, carving intricate objects out of sticks of chalk or standing on the sidelines of classroom violence. At home, he is struggling to cope with his mother being sick, while on his escapes into the countryside he finds himself grappling with the pull of young love.

These are age-old themes, and Sinha’s treatment of them has an admirable economy. Dialogue is infrequent, inviting us to consider what is going on in the boy’s mind, rather than having him constantly talk about it. The colours are lush and the camerawork lovely, yet the film still feels insubstantial, like chalk dust on the wind.