Nila Madhab Panda’s Kalira Atita has been invited by the Cornell University in New York for multiple screenings.
The filmmaker will also conduct a webinar with students and faculty of the university to discuss climate change and its implications.
Panda said in a statement, “I am happy that the film is being screened at Cornell. It will help more dialogues on the impact of climate change, as it’s based on true events in Odisha.”
Kalira Atita stars Pitobash Tripathy. The film, which is titled Yesterday’s Past in English, is about a man’s desperate struggle to reunite with his family after their village is swept away by the sea. The film is based on real accounts of people from Odisha’s coastal areas who have lost their homes and land to cyclones.
In an interview with Cinestaan.com last month, Panda had spoken about the unusual way in which he went about making the film. “I had a basic storyline, not the screenplay or dialogues," he said. "For the same reason, it was the toughest film to shoot. We sketched our character and started shooting the film, developing the story with each passing day. It’s a five-day-long story. While the shooting did not take more than 15 days, the edit took around eight months.”