The Blindspot review: This film felt like capturing a snapshot of childhood memories!

In this review, karan_mir aka Karan Mirchandani, gives us his take on the short film, The Blindspot aka Chashma! 

Your childhood is often littered with experiences that don’t hold up to scrutiny in the light of day. As you look back, you remember strange interactions with adults. Paper-thin reasoning was given for their actions, hoping you wouldn’t notice. Hoping that you won’t remember. But they stay with you long after the sunlight-filled ones fade away. The Blindspot (Chashma) feels like capturing a snapshot of that memory. Like the director, Nitin Baid, is reflecting on a week in school where the balance of justice felt skewed. In this microscopic environment of a boy's daily routine in the 1990s, we see his angst, an angst that traverses decades. 

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Set in Kolkata, a young Supriyo cannot see the blackboard, a cause for much struggle and belittling in class. Nothing is spelt out for you. The boy making fun of him is perfectly positioned as the villain. The mother, played pitch-perfect by Konkona, seems absent and distracted. His only support seems to be Vinay, his benchmate, fighting against the bullies. And the news of the demolition of a Masjid in 1992 that he can’t quite see. You quickly realise that the fading eyesight isn’t just literal; blindness runs deep around him in everything he sees. All of this in ten minutes. There is a lot that can be achieved with limited runtime. A rhythm can often be established early on, the economy of words becomes crucial and a lot of information transferred to us the audience, without it feeling forced. With the sharp dialogues and even sharper silences, the film makes you invest and fill in the gaps of a larger story that exists outside of this traumatic week.

The film does underline the revelations a tad at the end, which is slightly to its detriment. But even that feels like a nitpick as it expertly ties everything together better than most feature-length mysteries do! 

The Blindspot had its Indian premiere at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival this year! 

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