IMFF '25: Barah x Barah: Breaking the Fetters of Permanence

The title of Barah by Barah (2024, debuted at Indie Meme Festival 2025) translates to “twelve by twelve” in Hindi, one of the portrait sizes a photographer might sell. Writer Sunny Lahiri and Writer-Director Gaurav Madan are specifically referencing an industry in its twilight—death photography. In India, where it’s customary among Hindus to cremate their dead, it’s also common practice to snap one final portrait of your loved one, adorned in floral garlands and at peace, before letting go and scattering the ashes in any of the holy rivers of the country. However, the rise of personal smart phones has rapidly obviated the industry.

The story follows Sooraj, played by Gyanendra Tripathi, a death photographer who lives in the ancient city of Varanasi. When called Kashi or Manikarnika, the city or its most famous pool might be referenced as holy destinations for Hindus. When called Benares, the city might be referenced as either an exotic anglicization or the simple name many Indians still use out of habit. The multitude of names is an accurate indicator of the significance of the city to Hindus. It’s a city built on the Northern bank of the part of the Ganges that curves to redirect the river Northward. With this confluence of auspicious signs Varanasi is one of the most popular destinations for funerals. Between the smoke that dissolves into the air and the ash carried by the river, the deceased are reintegrated into the pure, nourishing cycle of life. 

Sooraj has a wife, child, an ailing father, and a best friend who sells lumber for the funeral pyres—relationships that influence and reflect his journey. Sooraj, whose livelihood depends on granting the impermanent a sort of permanence, on giving death meaning, becomes a beautiful vehicle to explore the central question of the film: what does it mean that the industry of death photography is itself dying? 

The narrative establishes an interesting incarnation of the classical Eros-Thanatos duality popularized in European and American media from Greek antiquity. Eros and Thanatos, the Love and Death duality is counterintuitive at first, but makes sense on reflection. Love is the emotional vehicle for sex, which creates life, a link that the film implicitly acknowledges. Meanwhile death is the ending of life; it’s the experiential relation of the human psyche to ending. Likewise we see Sooraj with his friend, the woodcutter, go to a brothel. Sooraj declines his friend’s offer to spend time with one of the sex workers and instead spends the entire time sober, smoking a cigarette, and clicking through his vast photo library of death portraits. Later, after his father dies, on the very same day, he has sex with his wife, different from the woodcutter’s sexual escapades in that this act is imbued with love and is a long awaited release that’s been delayed time and time again. In the midst of death he chooses love, and in the midst of sex he chooses death. Why?

Because love gives death meaning. He doesn’t only choose his wife. He also chooses his son. He also chooses his sister. The bonds of love throughout the story are set up to be strengthened. All he has to do is accept what life is giving him, rather than focusing on what death has taken from him. 

Focusing on what has been taken even represents a sort of death in the film. The woodcutter is named Tathagata, a cultural reference to The Buddha, from whom Hinduism gained fluency in the concept of impermanence. For Tathagata, business is still booming, so when he chooses to stop protesting private development in Kashi, it’s for two reasons. He wants to stop visiting the brothel and devote his youthful energy to raising a family. He also wants to accept that larger structural wheels have been set in motion that will not stop. The people deserve to have a direct route to Manikarnika, and if it wasn’t this development company destroying his Kashi, it’d be the rain and the wind. If the ancestral establishments along the way must be lost to do this, then wasn’t it a beautiful cause for which they, too, died? All too appropriately, it’s on seeing Tathagata’s mansion when Sooraj tears up for the first time. Comparison is the thief of joy and loss sets up growth in this case. Was what Sooraj lost more fruitful? Or the fight to preserve what was? Not the point. The point is to embrace the natural rhythms of things.

Sooraj stops seeing life as something opposed to death, and begins seeing it as something that might be enabled by death, a subtle transformation that Madan and Lahiri illustrate using the ancient theme of Eros and Thanatos. Likewise Tathagata starts seeing change as an inevitable force that’s best to harness rather than oppose.

Sooraj’s sister, Mansi, with whom he hasn’t spoken in eight years, makes plans to come to Kashi, to celebrate the springtime festival, Holi. While talking on the phone Mansi expresses regret for train delays causing her to miss the big bonfire the day before Holi. How does Sooraj comfort her? By reciting a couplet.

The plains and the mountains are no longer there. All the ice has melted.

Sooraj says these words jovially. And it makes Mansi laugh. She arrives for the celebration of new life, Holi, excitedly happy and is brought to a dissatisfying new truth. In a heart wrenching scene paying homage to the uniquely gorgeous Pather Panchali (1955), Mansi arrives after her long journey to find out their father has died. The next few days she spends with the family are marked by what they might create in life, rather than what’s ended in death. Her nephew, Sooraj’s son, picks up his father’s harmonica at Mansi’s urging. Mansi is a pilot for the Delhi metro, a sparkling, modern transport system representing the possibilities of the new. And his wife admires her for it. The family’s relationships strengthen, and Sooraj’s wife, Meena, feels the allure of the big city, carried by Mansi. Ultimately this tragedy represents a rebirth of possibilities. But only because Sooraj and his family embrace death as an agent of change.

Returning to the original question: What does it mean, that the industry of death photography is itself dying? Madan and Lahiri offer a wonderfully Asian response. 

Absolutely nothing.

This isn’t something to balk at, or reel in horror from. It’s something in which to find liberation. Just like life after death. A fetter to a now gone time has been broken. It’s time to relish what you have. It’s time to relish what you don’t have. It’s time to dance. It’s time to work. It’s time to contemplate. It’s time to live.

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