Removal of the Eye

Official Selection, 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam

Ram and Kallia are New York-based new parents, and their baby, Niko, cannot sleep. Ram, an aspiring rapper, is under the influence of a “streamlined, militaristic” sleep training program that he heard about from a neighbor, which is in tension with Kallia’s anti-cry-it-out blogosphere philosophies. Against the backdrop of their chronic exhaustion, this conflict spirals into a dynamic of deception, aloofness, and parental spats.

Meanwhile, Kallia’s parents live downstairs. After her father falls, Kallia and Ram become temporary caretakers of her ailing mother, Katerina. Katerina believes that the evil eye has touched them and they must perform an exorcism on baby Niko. While desperately trying to shield her son from this desire, Kallia also needs to finish her dissertation, navigating playtime, autoethnographic trends in academia, job interviews that demand one word answers only, and literally putting out fires.

A follow-up to Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw’s debut feature New Strains (SDAFF ‘23), REMOVAL OF THE EYE revisits Ram and Kallia in a much more domestic phase of life, bringing the whole family into the work. Co-starring Shaw’s parents and their own young son, Kamalakanthan and Shaw’s cocktail of aesthetics blend the intimate and archival with the satirical and unsettling, in an off-kilter portrait of early parental somnambulism.

– Kim-Anh Schreiber