A Marathi film which sensitively explores the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s Disease on the elderly was recently screened at Harvard University .
Astu (so be it), a 2013 film by the noted filmmaking duo of Sumitra Bhave, a sociologist and the FTII-trained Sunil Sukhtankar, starring thespian Mohan Agashe, is an intense mediation on the symptoms of dementia in the elderly, the societal response to the malady and the travails of old age.
The screening was followed by a panel discussion which included Dr. Agashe, himself a psychiatrist, the Director of the Harvard Asia Centre Arthur Kleinman also a psychiatrist and anthropologist and the Frederic Wertham professor of Law and Psychiatry in society, Diana Eck, among others.
Ms. Bhave and Mr. Sukhtankar have been responsible for some of the Marathi celluloid’s most thoughtful and cerebral films in recent years, touching on an astonishing range of issues, from academic underachievers in Dahavi Fa to Ek Cup Chya on the Right to Information Act to the mesmerizing Vaastupurush — a dazzling meditation on loss and remembrance.
Astu revolves around a Sanskrit scholar Chakrapani Shastri (essayed by Dr. Agashe), now retired, living with debilitating dementia. As his daughter and her doctor husband try to cope with Shastri’s cognitive decline, the latter wanders off seeking an elephant on the street. “Since the film was already part of the New York Film Festival, I wrote to Dr. Kleinman who endorsed the picture’s relevance as they at Harvard have been working on the subject,” said Dr. Agashe.
