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Incarnations of I

Sponsored Project

  • Sharbari Bose Kamat, Director
  • Vanessa Roth, Producer
  • Rianjali Bhowmick, Producer
A dark-skinned woman with long black hair wearing a sage green dress looks downward as she is surrounded by trees.

About the Project

After decades of upholding the deeply rooted worship of a Hindu warrior goddess, a Bengali American woman mines the personal and collective traumas behind the art of clay idol-making—questioning what it means to create, to heal, and to be loved.

Over the course of the film, she connects with three artisans in West Bengal whose labor of molding statues for religious festivals, by hand, is a salve for painful life experiences not unlike her own. For 40 years, the idol of the goddess that her immigrant father sculpted in the States was her spiritual anchor as she struggled with depression and anxiety stemming from abuse.

In a culture that stigmatizes mental health, she now sees herself mirrored in the artisans' stories as they break cycles of generational trauma and forge lives full of creativity and faith. While hard truths emerge, INCARNATIONS OF I celebrates healing amid the beauty and chaos of worship.