What would you do if the person you love the most, changes?

What does a child do when a beloved parent turns into someone unrecognizable?

FOR REAL is a story of a six-year-old who witnesses a moment of discord within her family. The ensuing depression evident in her parents causes a chain reaction in the child’s mind, making her withdraw into a fantasy world where she believes her real mother has been sent to the Orion Galaxy and “mother” at home is really an Alien. No one believes her story till the lonely child runs away in search of her real mother.

For young parents today, the pressures of modern existence are cracking the armor of even the most balanced adults. Burdens of aspiration and slaps of failure cause domestic discord in homes around the world everyday, affecting the lives of millions of children. Studies indicate that a combination of parental depression and marital discord can be a precursor to behavioral and psychological problems in children, making them withdraw internally (depression) or externally (misbehavior, flights of fantasy etc). Even a child with every conceivable comfort and the unconditional love of the parents can crumble in the face of domestic strife. Younger children are more susceptible to replicating parental behavior patterns as adults, thereby causing a garbled legacy that gets handed down from generation to generation.

To my mind, subjecting a child to an unhappy home environment is in one word, abusive. It runs the risk of the child in question never reaching his/her full potential.

In FOR REAL, I have explored the story of an unhappy home through the eyes of an imaginative little girl, whose only motivation is to see her mother happy. This film is my attempt to hold a mirror up to society, asking it to acknowledge the most widespread form of child abuse that remains socially acceptable till date.

My hope is that if one responsible parent watching the film acknowledges the effect of his/her actions on their child, a child’s life somewhere will change for the better.