Dhachka
2018 · 15m · India
Directed by Devik Rathod
Lata, a 50-year-old wife and mother who silently holds her bickering family together, is pushed past her limit on a chaotic road trip to a wedding and quietly takes the wheel — literally and figuratively — when her husband and son lose their way.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the road trip to blow up—husband fumbles, son whines, chaos erupts—but Rathod's actual subversion is quieter and more brutal: watching a woman stop performing invisibility without a single speech about it.
Dhachka understands the lineage of ensemble family comedy while grafting onto it a formal restraint that belongs to a different, more austere tradition; the result is genuinely sui generis.
The film's entire architecture pivots on Lata's hand touching the steering wheel—a single gesture that reframes everything before it and after, and Rathod lets that moment breathe without underlining it.
Reviews
Award Winning Hindi Short Film
Festivals
- Filmfare Short Film Awards 2019, Nominated