Momo Deal

Momo Deal opens with the voice of a dead girl at her funeral. Except it’s quirky. This young woman, Mahima (Anushka Kaushik), is reading out her own wishlist for the funeral — the way any manic-pixie hall of famer like Jab We Met’s Geet might (we learn that her favourite song is “Tumse hi”) to lighten the mood. One zoom-out of the camera reveals that none of Mahima’s wishes have been followed, especially the one that demands her best friend Naman (Akashdeep Arora) to weep loudly at the front. Naman is instead numb. His deadpan face suggests he’s an action hero who can’t act, but he’s something more common: an Indian man who can’t — or won’t — express himself. He refuses to cry. Dheeraj Jindal’s 13-minute short then features a late-night conversation between Naman and the ghost of his newly-deceased bestie. They walk the streets of their hometown, Jaipur, and exchange difficult emotions.