From the director's description: “The Birth of this film took place due to some experimental shots which I did not want to throw away. The jerky camera movements, irregular framing, bad quality of picture and low light shots were intentional to give this film a dynamic image. To summarise, the ‘existense' of this film is the result of an experiment, not any before hand planning”
“Existence” review is part of the Submit Your Film Initiative
After a few special effects through in-camera techniques, the film opens with a young man wearing sunglasses, who stands on his own smoking, while a narrating voice presents his thoughts on existence. The next scene takes place inside the house of the man, who is soon revealed to be a photographer. His girlfriend or wife is fed up with him, and is ready to abandon him, ‘to the normal world, with normal people' as per her words. His rather smug and condescending behaviour, which is masked under a pretense of intellectualism regarding the concept of normalcy, makes her even angrier, and she leaves him cursing. The man then continues to philosophize, first about his shadow, and the about the reasons of his existence. His narration is interrupted by a series of videos from poor homeless people, and an accusation towards the US, as a waving flag of the country suggests. More comments about existence follow, interrupted by another set of SFX.
Rohit Ganguly, as himself suggests, presents an effort that can barely pass as film, with its style lingering somewhere between the cinematic exercise and the art installation. The most interesting aspect of the 9 minute short comes from the footage of the poor on the street actually, which shows that the director has an eye for capturing everyday life with realism.
The rest of the film however, suffers from the bad-accented, faulty English of the narration, the rather smug protagonist whose philosophizing eventually ends up being buffoonery, and an overall sense that this is a title that is not addressed to anyone but the filmmaker himself. The interaction with his girlfriend offers a sense of tension that is somewhat interesting, but that is all there in a movie that can only be perceived as a ‘learning from one's own mistakes' exercise.
