The Call
The year is 2021. Akira busies herself with work as she avoids calls from her estranged parents. But a voice message from her father leaves her spiraling as she finds out her mother might be seriously ill.

Synopsis
The year is 2021. Akira busies herself with work as she avoids calls from her estranged parents. But a voice message from her father leaves her spiraling as she finds out her mother might be seriously ill. She is drowning her anxieties in alcohol, when she hears a mysterious buzzing in her bathroom and finds an old flip phone under her sink. Upon picking up, she connects with Jesse, a pot dealer taking care of her sick mother in 2006. Jesse and Akira come face to face in the apartment where they both live 15 years apart, but they are soon thrust into one another’s times, Jesse ending up in 2021, and Akira finding herself with Jesse’s mother in the past. As they attempt to escape this time warp, Jesse encounters her own social media from the future and learns what is in store for her, while Akira learns to empathize with a mother’s point of view.
10 mins

About Gayatri Everitt Bajpai
Gayatri Everitt Bajpai is a filmmaker based in Vancouver. She earned her MFA in Film Production at UCLA, where she won Directors’ Spotlight Awards for two of her short films, Housewarming and Muck, and produced a documentary about Francis Ford Coppola’s live cinema project Distant Vision. For her thesis film, she was one of three filmmakers chosen to direct a segment of an anthology feature executive produced by James Franco. Gayatri and her co-director Nirav Bhakta have since won HBO’s 2019 APA Visionaries with their short film Halwa, which has gone on to garner awards at festivals around the world. Gayatri is developing her first feature.