Poetry, adolescence and coming in terms with the world as we never wanted it to be, make for potent images. Both cinematic and that of the word. Crimson, directed by Rohit Kumar Dasgupta, explores the grey bits of the collage, the silences that have to be dealt with amid the cacophony of living. Dasgupta’s eight-minute film, which will be screened at the Nigah Queer Festival in Delhi, started off as a long narrative poetry, before he found that the images that thus came up, could be interpreted through cinema.

“The biggest challenge was to convert the poem, around five-pages long, into a screenplay,” says Dasgupta. So, he decided to craft Crimson out as a series of images. “I decided against putting dialogues in the film as they would tamper with the flow of emotions that the poetry has,” says Dasgupta. So he first worked on realising concrete images from bits of emotions and then got an omniscient narrator to include the poem in the film.

Crimson is about a bisexual girl who finds it difficult to deal with the intense emotions that she feels for a girl and a boy at the same time. Understandably, it stands to question the premise of social disciplines. “It’s not entirely about the society also. It questions pre-conceived notions about emotional states. Why is it necessary to choose between two people and how to deal with things when you can’t?” says Dasgupta.