Actor and filmmaker Amartya Ray’s short documentary film titled ‘You In This City, This City Inside You’ was recently nominated at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2025. Ray talks to Aradhna Sethi, tracing how music, migration, solitude and artistic instincts converge in his film, capturing Bombay in all its beauty, brutality and restless possibility.
His grandfather, Shyamal Ghoshal acted in some of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak’s films. His mother Chaiti Ghoshal has had a long-standing career in the Bengali film, theatre and television industry. Kolkata-born Amartya Ray grew up surrounded by cinema and allied arts. Young Ray has always had an affinity for literature and poetry since his school days, and even wrote some short, fanciful stories and later songs as a musician.
Sure enough, Ray’s storytelling sharpened, shaped by time spent on film sets and inside rehearsal rooms.
Later, acting in large-scale Bollywood films such as ‘Maidaan’ alongside Ajay Devgn, as well as Bengali films like ‘Uronchondi’, part of the IFFI Panorama 2018, further encouraged him to expand his storytelling style. Post-college, he did ‘ 22 Yards. He says, “This was one of the most liberating feelings that opened up my life to cinema in another way, altogether. I believe all these allied forms – direction, music, acting – helped me tell a better story.”
In this interview with Namaste Switzerland, he tells us more.
Q. When did you realise you wanted to pursue cinema?
AR: I was graduating. While most of my friends were applying for jobs or M.Techs and MBAs, I would spend days playing music as an independent musician at cafes and bars across the city. I’d walk around alone, observing people and the world unfold around me. I remember feeling that I wanted to document this through stories… more often than not, I would daydream sequences like in films. Hailing from a family of artists, cinema had always been around me. I realised that the only thing I wanted to learn further academically was filmmaking.
Then, one day during the monsoons, I saw the leaves falling in the wind outside my college…. This reminded me of scenes from a Japanese film – cherry blossoms falling in the wind. I remember wanting to know how one can create things like that in cinema. I mustered up the courage and appeared for the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) exams for film direction and screenplay to see where I stood compared to the rest of the country in this field. What followed has been a merry ride!
Q. What inspired the making of ‘You In This City, This City Inside You’?
AR: Through my college days, I realised I liked spending days imagining lives other than my own. Daydreaming about strangers, observing people who mostly go unnoticed on the streets, imagining the deep night in the city I lived in. I would be a stranger to my own life, as if imagining it.
In Bombay, I loved walking through the city, like a flaneur, witnessing urban life unfold before me. The city’s streets attract me the most, especially at night. I wanted to make a film that showcased poetic glimpses of life inside a metropolis that, in phases, alienates you with its harshness, isolation, and division, yet also romances you with its curiosity, history, spaces, and the people who inhabit it. As an outsider, I’ve felt that Bombay allows multiple realities and identities to coexist.
Migration has been one of the most important discourses of our times, and Bombay is a city built by and inhabited by migrants, whether living in chawls or under bridges, in flats or lavish skyscrapers. I am among those migrants as well – more privileged than many and less than many. I wanted to make a diary-like film about a migrant’s experience of life in such a metropolis.
Q. How did the selection at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur happen?
AR: I’d applied to Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, which the team and I knew was one of the best places for short films across Europe, with a long-standing tradition of 29 years. We were fortunate to be part of a selection of Indian Narratives that represented stories from the Indian diaspora to global audiences. They have strict selection procedures, and we are happy to have had our film premiere there this November.
Q. What next?
AR: I am planning to join the rehearsals for a grand theatre production staging an adaptation of Shakespeare. Directorially, I am looking to start pitching a feature-length documentary next at forums and for grants. Parallely, I am working on my debut feature idea. I take a good while to write, as it becomes hard for me to convince myself of something before committing it to paper.
Amartya Ray appears to be a promising young actor and film writer. Let’s stay tuned to find out what he has in store for the film industry in the next few years.
Synopsis: A series of unanswered phone calls made by an unnamed narrator plays over poetic glimpses of everyday life unfolding across the city of Bombay in this intimate diary film.
We listen to the mundane reflections, dreams, fears and ambitions of a young migrant man, working as a cook in a hotel while witnessing the city’s multitudinous nature. When an altercation costs him his job, the fear of eviction leaves him uncertain about his survival in the city.
The film remains a modern archive of Bombay’s people, its changing spaces and a lyrical reflection on the lives of its migrant residents.
Watch the trailer here:
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