7 DAYS

Official Selection, 2021 Tribeca Film Festival

Official Selection, 2021 BFI London Film Festival

There are plenty of ways an online date can go wrong, but a statewide shelter-in-place order is a uniquely contemporary curveball. Rita and Ravi are on a perfectly manageable bad first date. She shrugs it off because she’s just doing it for her Indian mom anyway, and he, well, he doesn’t know any better. In any other year, on any other day, this picnic served with blundering banter and sweaty faces would be a routine first and last meeting. But this is March 2020 and in the middle of their awkwardness, their phones blow up. The world is shutting down. It’s time to go home. Problem is, public transit has stalled and the area hotels are closed. Rita graciously lets the dorky Ravi stay the night, because how long can a shutdown last after all?

Long enough for the gloves to come off and things to get real, it turns out. Rita isn’t the traditional Indian bride her dating profile made her out to be, and until he can get a rental car, Ravi will have to live with it. The history of rom-com tells us opposites will attract and time will heal all wounds, but when a historical anomaly strikes, how will they know if it’s love or just the daze of quarantine?

As clever about pandemic anxiety as it is about the limits of the genre, 7 DAYS is an uproarious two-person farce, a clinic in comedy by leads Karan Soni and Geraldine Viswanathan, and the perfect first feature for physician-turned-filmmaker Roshan Sethi. 7 DAYS is a model for how films about 2020 don’t have to skirt limitations but can embrace them, breathe their funky aerosols, and find new ways to rattle the bells in our hearts.

–Brian Hu

Admission includes outdoor post-screening reception (opening night only).

Co-Presented by Alliance of Chinese Americans San Diego, TiE San Diego, USD Communication Studies.