Ankita Gusain Turns Her Father’s Absence Into A Poetic Meditation On Family & Inheritance

For the past few days I’ve been dreaming about my dad who I lost in 2022. In one of them, we’re packing for a road trip, something we did multiple times a year for my entire childhood and teenage life; in another one, he’s already gone, and I’m sitting with his friends who are reminiscing about their time together— all occurring around his birthday.

Every time I wake up, it takes a few mins for his ‘presence’ to wear off as I drift back into reality, and although I don’t believe in an afterlife, I’m amazed by my mind’s capacity to hold him inside me in such a real, almost paranormal way. After having been in therapy for years, I’ve come to believe that that which our parents impart on to us is too big to fit into words like childhood trauma or daddy/mommy issues —  it feels more like an animate, nebulous creature that melds itself into our own identities. 

I’m reminded of the same in Ankita Gusain’s debut short documentary, ‘Six Weeks, 3 Days, and All the Years Before’, that chronicles this inseparable connection between a child and their parent. After Ankita’s father left home during her childhood, the distance that followed settled into her life, becoming a part of the ordinary. “Filmmaking became a way of entering that distance, of moving closer to something that had remained largely unseen and unspoken between us,” she shares. During the process, Ankita learned of her pregnancy, which made her think about inheritance, “About what passes through us even when we cannot fully name it,” she notes.

Addressed as a letter to her unborn child, the 15-minute documentary breezes through the past and present through images, dreams and fragments of memory. Its poetic montages allow different moments in Ankita’s life and inner world to overlap and unfold through visual associations. Her ruminations are also paired with her father, Surendra Singh Gusain’s life, who now spends his days in a remote village in Uttarakhand writing astrology scripts, recording videos for YouTube, speaking to clients across the country over patchy phone calls and caring for his ageing grandmother, Asarthi Devi. Against the slow rhythms of the Himalayan landscape and pensive shots of the mountains and windswept trees, the film becomes a larger reflection on parental absence and how much more insistent it can be. 

An FTII graduate, Gusain is a filmmaker and cinematographer whose practice explores familial relationships, childhood experiences and their influence on adult lives. With location sound by Yash Sharma, sound design by Vineeth PK, mixing by Samonjoy Bhattacharya, background music by Nishant Ramteke, and Mahak Gupta as the colourist, Ankita co-wrote the documentary with Chetan Kapri, who also handled cinematography and co-produced the film. ‘Six Weeks, 3 Days, and All the Years Before’ will have its world premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2026, where it has been selected for the Competition for Short Documentary.

Follow Ankita here and watch the trailer for the documentary below:

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