Nauha
2022 · 26m · India
Directed by Pratham Khurana
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Kishan, a 22-year-old who arrives in Delhi from Uttarakhand to earn a livelihood, becomes the live-in caregiver for an ailing elderly widower whose grown children live in the United States. As the old man's health fails, the bond between the two men becomes a meditation on mourning, class divide, and the narrow definitions of family.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Most scouts would read 'elderly man + young caregiver' and see prestige grief-lit; Khurana instead locks you into the tactile, almost invisible economy of labor itself—the film's refusal to sentimentalize either character is genuinely rare.
A formally assured debut that understands silence as a curatorial choice rather than absence, situating itself deliberately in the lineage of South Asian cinema that privileges observational restraint and the ethical weight of the everyday.
The film's entire architecture hinges on a single recurring decision—the camera's commitment to Kishan's hands during the caregiving sequences—which transforms routine physical labor into something that feels genuinely ancestral and unprecedented.
Reviews
Nauha is the only student film from India to make it to the esteemed Cannes Film Festival.
While the film is primarily about the losses suffered, it also deals with urbanization, class divide, and the restricted use of the term 'family'.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 2022