CWC Global: Devastated (Vidhvastha)

In Devastated (2024) , a middle-aged policeman in present-day India opens up to his wife and lover about his work as a “sacrificial assistant,” a state-designated agent tasked with extrajudicial killings of Muslim men. Elsewhere in the city, Lord Krishna and the prince Arjuna enact a dialogue from the Bhagavad Gita. After being paralyzed during battle by unwillingness to kill his own relatives, Arjuna seeks the counsel of Krishna, who instructs him on the moral duty of a warrior. Avant-garde filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak uses images of animal sacrifice and ritual self-mortification, repeatedly intercut with the policeman’s defense of his killings, to raise questions about the hierarchy of violence and the nature of divinity. Director Ashish Avikunthak and cinematographer Rumi (Pratyush Bhattacharyya) joined moderator Vivek Karthikeyan (Art, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Devastated. Ashish Avikunthak is an Indian avant-garde filmmaker, film theorist, archaeologist, and cultural anthropologist. His films have been showcased internationally at major festivals, museums, and galleries, including Tate Modern (London) , Centre Pompidou (Paris) , Locarno, Rotterdam, and Berlin film festivals. He has had retrospectives at MUBI, Wolf Kino (Berlin) , Bard College, and Yale University, among others, and was named a Future Great by ArtReview in 2014. In 2025, he received the Ground Glass Award from Prismatic Ground, the New York–based festival of experimental documentary and avant-garde film, in recognition of his “outstanding contributions to the field of experimental media.” Avikunthak is the author of Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science, and Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2021) . Most recently, an edited volume about his films was published by Bloomsbury titled The Epistemic Archeology of Ashish Avikunthak: Cinema and Religiosity of Everyday Life. He holds a Ph. D. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, previously taught at Yale, and is currently Professor of Film/Media at the Harrington School of Communication, University of Rhode Island. Rumi is a Ph. D. student in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a Masters in Filmmaking from the London Film School and has worked as a cinematographer on numerous films across India, the United Kingdom, Japan, Bangladesh, as well as the United States. Since 2018, he has been collaborating with filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak as a cinematographer and has lensed four of Avikunthak’s feature films so far, including Devastated. His research centers on the histories and aesthetics of cinematography in Indian and transnational experimental documentaries, including found-footage and essay films, with a particular interest in the role of archives in documentary practice and in varied modes of cinematic work. He is the author of “Is the World Really as It Appears in Art? Violence as a Civilizational Question in Ashish Avikunthak’s Vidhvastha” in The Epistemic Archeology of Ashish Avikunthak (Bloomsbury, 2026) . Vivek is a transdisciplinary artist-researcher working at the intersection of experimental film and video, computational media, expanded cinema, and installation. Formally trained as a cinematographer, Vivek has apprenticed with several leading Indian filmmakers such as Rajiv Menon and Ranjan Palit, working on a variety of projects including independent features, documentaries, experimental shorts, and video art, across India, South Korea, and the United States. His current research focuses on the emerging poetics of a transmodernist experimental moving image praxis that is informed by Indian avant-garde cinema traditions such as the Cinema of Prayoga, classical South Asian philosophy, cognitive psychology, and new media architectures. Vivek is also a final year MFA candidate in the Studio Art program at UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Art. This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center. 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. Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.