Aditi Singh

Aditi Singh is a young Indian woman working as a secretary in Bombay. She gets romantically involved with Rajiv Kumar, the overseer of her office at the university of Bombay. Coming from a traditional family, she asks Rajiv to get engaged, but he refuses. Thus begins the secret love story that drives this film. All the dialogues in it are monologues adapted from the love letters exchanged by Fernando Pessoa and Ofelia Queiroz.

The city of Bombay underscores the solitude of these two beings, caught between tradition and modernity. Shooting in India is a powerful experience, the visual and sound elements encountered establishing a bridge between different eras. From the delivery boy carrying typewritten letters, to the numerous pedestrians, carriages, animals that crowd the streets, all attests to a human presence that predates the spread of computers and cell phones. This presence is at the heart of an artisanal film, shot in 16 mm. in fixed shots, with direct sound recording, and edited by hand.

The letters written in Portuguese were translated into English, French, and Hindi, and performed in Hindi, a language based on Sanskrit, the oldest Indian language and source for all of them. Hindi is a language with a very sophisticated phonetics as well as a very marked rhythm, as is illustrated by this excerpt from the first letter sent by Aditi to Rajiv :

Estou desprezando um rapaz que me adora
Je dédaigne un garçon qui m’adore,
I am neglecting a boy who adores me,
Mai us ladke ki upeksha kar rahi hun jo mujhe pasand karta hai.

que me faria feliz e aue eu sei muito bem as ideias d’ele para mim
qui me rendrait heureuse et dont je sais pertinemment les projets qu’il nourrit pour moi,
who would make me happy and that I know very well the views he has about me,
Mujhe pata hai ki woh mujhase kya chahta hai.