ATHENA

A thena is nine years old. She is from Greece. Her mother is a translator; her father is somewhere we do not see. They have come to Kolkata for a few weeks — long enough to coincide with Durga Puja, the festival in which the city becomes a stage for the arrival, worship, and farewell of the goddess.

Athena does not yet know what she is walking into. The sound, the light, the heat, the rhythm of the dhak drums — none of it is in any book her mother has packed. On the first evening she wanders into the sculptor’s workshop where the idols are being finished, and there a woman she has never met before begins to tell her a story.

Through Athena’s eyes, the audience encounters the Devi Mahatmya the same way she does: for the first time, in a place she does not yet understand, told by a stranger who does.

She is the bridge between the two worlds the film holds open — the everyday and the mythological — and she is the reason both can be told to anyone, anywhere.