What does it mean to be human? Stripped of language and learned behaviour that we pick up from our surroundings, what would we look like? Even with everything we know about the world and ourselves, there are times when we are just as clueless as a creature newly thrust into unfamiliar flesh — aware, but unprepared. It is in this strange and disoriented state that short film 'Moti' begins.

Set in Kolkata during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bengali short film follows a family whose pet dog inexplicably turns into a human being. What begins as a bizarre and slightly comic premise gradually unfolds into an allegorical meditation on the absurdity of lockdown, the porous boundary between species, and the fragility of identity in times of crisis.

Moti is directed by Yash Saraf, an Indian filmmaker from Kolkata with a multidisciplinary background that spans literature, cinema, theatre, and education. A graduate of Stanford University with a degree in Russian literature, Yash has worked as an assistant writer with renowned filmmakers like Sooni Taraporevala on 'Salaam Bombay!' and 'The Namesake', and Anand Gandhi on 'Ship of Theseus' and 'Tumbbad'. Having worked as an arts educator in Mumbai, Kolkata, and New Delhi, the film reflects his sustained engagement with cinematic experimentation and storytelling as both a craft and a mode of inquiry.

The transformation itself is never explained. It simply happens as things so often did during that unnameable time — without logic or warning. The family, stunned but devoted, does their best to accommodate this new reality. They take Moti to a hospital, only to be turned away because he has no ID — a perfectly bureaucratic absurdity that mirrors the disorienting rules and protocols that emerged overnight during the pandemic. The fact that he has just become a man is immaterial; the system requires papers.

Moti’s transformation becomes a vehicle for some profound questions. The most poignant among them is what happens when he begins to lose his sense of smell (another nod to a symptom of Covid). Once a dog with a heightened sensory life, Moti, now human, finds himself with the fractional smell receptors of humans. “Most of a dog’s perception comes from smell,” the boy from the family explains. “So losing it is like going blind.” With that loss comes a rupture in selfhood and a collapse of identity. If much of who we are is shaped by how we sense and navigate the world, then Moti’s fading olfactory abilities become a metaphor for a more existential kind of disappearance.

During lockdown, as our contact with the outside world shrank, many of us experienced a similar kind of sensory diminishment. In this way, Moti draws a subtle parallel: just as the dog loses his primary mode of perception, we too lost something of ourselves in isolation. The film questions this by asking “Was this evolution or the opposite?” Are human beings really the superior species when so many animals have capabilities far more extraordinary than us? In the context of the themes of the film, this question also points to our so-called advancements in medicine and technology as a society — advancements that due to poor infrastructure and security for the marginalised, crumbled in the face of a pandemic.

In trying to adjust to his new body, Moti gives us food for thought on how little control we have over the forces that reshape us. In the magical realism of this dog-turned-human's search for self, a struggle not too different from our own is mirrored from a time that turned our world upside down in a fog of uncertainty and helplessness.

Follow Yash here.

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