Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
CWC Global: Hearth and Home (Alaav)
- Tuesday, October 13, 2026 / 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (123 minutes)
- With Prabhash Chandra (director)
Prabhash Chandra’s 2024 film Hearth and Home (Alaav) follows Bhaveen Gossain, a 63-year-old son caring for his ailing 95-year-old mother, Savitri, in their quiet suburban home in New Delhi, India. Rarely leaving the house, Bhaveen devotes himself entirely to his mother’s care, from the moment he wakes until he goes to sleep. Through long, static shots and an observational approach, the film transforms the routines of caregiving—eating, cleaning, and bathing—into intimate and meditative rituals. These moments capture Bhaveen’s tenderness, playfulness, patience, and devotion alongside the struggles, frustrations, and resentment that caregiving can entail. Dispassionate yet intimate, Hearth and Home (Alaav) offers a complex portrait of love, caregiving, and family obligation, as well as what it means to care for someone until the very end.
Director Prabhash Chandra will join moderator Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Hearth and Home (Alaav).
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Prabhash Chandra (director)
Born and brought up in Bihar, India, Prabhash Chandra is the artistic director of Alpana Theatre. He holds a postgraduate degree from the Department of Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Delhi. For the past decade, he has been actively engaged in filmmaking and theatre, working on a range of projects while also conducting workshops and teaching. His first feature fiction film, I’m Not The River Jhelum (Be Ches Ne Veth), received critical acclaim, including the K.R. Mohanan Award for Best Debut Director from India at the 26th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in 2022. Hearth and Home (Alaav) is his latest work and has screened at the Festival des 3 Continents, the Dharamshala International Film Festival, and Indian Film Festival Bhubaneswar.
Moderator Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
Bhaskar Sarkar is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009), a critical exploration of the cinematic traces of a particular historical trauma. He has coedited the collections Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017), and The Routledge Handbook of Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020). Currently, he is completing a monograph titled Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture, and working on two other book-length projects: one about piratical practices in the Global South, and the other about queer underground club cultures in millennial Los Angeles.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Global
Media are global by nature; they express culture just as much as they transcend borders. The CWC Global series is dedicated to showcasing media from around the world. This series features screenings and events that place UCSB in conversation with international media makers and global contexts across our deeply connected world.