r/Unnao

They Storm in my father shop and tried to loot him

In 2021, during lockdown, I returned to Unnao thinking I would make a documentary about farmers.

The day my father picked me up from the station, he told me my uncle had died. He was supposed to be the subject of the film.

After that, I stopped trying to make “a proper film.”

I just started wandering around the city with a camera.

I spent time with boys from my neighbourhood who had just finished college during lockdown and were drifting through uncertainty. We sat around empty hostels, tea stalls, railway crossings, abandoned grounds. Nobody knew what came next.

Instead of writing scenes, I just talked to them on camera.

That slowly became a no-budget short film called Dostinagar.

Watching it now feels strange because many of those places no longer exist in the same way. The hostel where we shot is gone. Some people moved away. Some friendships disappeared quietly after lockdown ended.

The film accidentally became an archive of a vanished summer in Unnao.

I also wrote a small piece about that period:

https://open.substack.com/pub/prateekkumar/p/fragments-from-a-vanished-summer

Film :

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0GLYTdrCvFav2M5L2Cm1APcsMxki0hD0&si=woEz7Vwa1QcUiIhg