'Moda Moda' is a surreal Kannada short film by Bengaluru filmmaker MK Abhilash about a married couple who become increasingly consumed by the idea of having a child they plan to name 'Clouds'. What begins as ordinary conversations about marriage and parenthood takes an absurd turn when the husband becomes pregnant, allowing the film to question the expectations placed on motherhood and the assumption that having children is a natural part of adult life. Through its humour, strange visual world and portrayal of domestic violence, the film also examines what happens when the desire to have a family becomes tied to the state of a marriage.
Why do people want children? For some, it’s a primal, evolutionary imperative to continue a lineage. For others, it comes from love, companionship or the hope of building a home together. And then there’s the third kind — a Hail Mary attempt to save a marriage. Why not? Across cultures, babies have also come to represent possibility itself. They embody futures that have not yet taken shape, lives that exist first as ideas, dreams and expectations before they become real. Nothing can make you give a harder reality check than the prospect of having a child — of what you truly believe about yourself, the world you live in, and the one you’re willing to create for them. Kannada filmmaker MK Abhilash explores those questions through an unexpected lens in his latest short film, 'Moda Moda' (2025), a surreal, playful short.
The roughly 20-minute Kannada short follows Ashok and Ratna, a married couple who are trying to have children. While they contemplate a nuclear family, their own hopes and insecurities come to surface. Written, directed and scored by MK Abhilash, with cinematography by Mahishaa, the film carries the same creative voice across its storytelling and music. Abhilash, a Bengaluru-based filmmaker, music producer and poet associated with the counter-culture collective Neelavarana, experimented with surrealism in shorts like Dictionary Mohan and Kuuk Aah? With ‘Moda Moda’ he returns to the same to talk about motherhood, parenting and marriage.
The film looks at the idea of having children with comedic absurdity. It features a couple whose conversations about Monday mornings, what they would name their child and where the baby would sleep are the kind of mundane bedroom banter that could happen in any marriage, except here they become part of a larger obsession with having a child. Their entire domestic life seems to orbit around this future baby, pointing to the question: why do we want children in the first place? Are we genuinely ready for parenthood, or can having a child become something to fill the boredom and daily ennui of a marriage? Could it even become a way to save a dying marriage? The film takes these questions away from the grand narratives of legacy, heritage and kinship that we often attach to reproduction, especially when it comes to having a boy, and looks at the cultural value we have assigned to having children in its barest form.
In the film, Ashok’s pregnant sister asks him to let her ‘inhabit’ him after which he becomes pregnant — we see him take on the persona of a ‘mother’ — a contrast to the husband who otherwise reacts aggressively to the suggestion of adopting because it questions his ‘manhood’. By playing with the gendered expectations of an Indian family, the film makes us question how ‘natural’ motherhood actually is. We have been trained to see motherhood as the purpose of a woman, to celebrate pregnancy as an inherently beautiful event and to treat the arrival of a baby as something that should automatically bring joy, which may be true, but is also a myopic lens that overlooks the pain, sacrifices, and physical changes a woman goes through during pregnancy. By reversing the roles, 'Moda Moda' defamiliarizes us with obligations we’ve been conditioned to put women under.
Through delightful devices like the intertitles of silent films, animation, and stop motion, the film pokes fun at the amusing conditions that surround a decision as serious as reproduction. From themes like the mundanity of a marriage that needs a kid to fill a hole, to domestic abuse and the responsibility of child safety, Moda Moda both punches up in its endearing critique of procreation, and aligns itself with the shift from the question of ‘why don’t you want to have kids’ to ‘why do you?’
Follow Abhilash here and watch the short film below:
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