How Ankita Gusain turned her complex relationship with her father into an inventive docu-short

Ankita Gusain, the director of 'Six Weeks, 3 Days, and All the Years Before', on how the film emerged, her evolving relationship with her father and the challenges of telling a story so close to her life

Ankita Gusain's debut documentary, Six Weeks, 3 Days, and All the Years Before, explores her complex relationship with her father, who left when she was very young. "He has been distant throughout my life, and later on, when I grew up, I too became distant from him," says the Mumbai-based filmmaker, whose film will premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2026 on November 14. It was only later, while she was at film school, that she managed to examine that relationship more deeply. "It is not just presence that shapes a person, but also absence. A lot of my understanding of life and human relationships comes from the fact that he was not there," she says.

Six Weeks, 3 Days, and All the Years Before is a reflection on her father's disappearance and eventual return, revisiting their relationship through a visual letter to her unborn child. The title of the film, in fact, alludes to the exact moment when she first heard her child's heartbeat: six weeks and three days. "When I got to know about the pregnancy, a lot of things changed for me," says Ankita, who was still making the film at this point. This news changed the way she understood things, and so it became an important and integral thing to keep in the title. "And the second part of the title, 'All the years before', is because everything that happened previous to that is what I started this film with," she adds.