If you are a believer in the afterlife, have you ever wondered how it all happens? Arati Kadav seems to have given it a great deal of thought and put it together gorgeously in the new Netflix Original film, Cargo.
Featuring Vikrant Massey as a rakshasa, Cargo is a sci-fi film which imagines ancient Indian demons running afterlife through a spaceship, Pushpak 634A. The story revolves around Prahastha, Massey as the lonely demon astronaut, who has been working alone in a spaceship for centuries and responsible for millions of reincarnations. His spaceship comes close to Earth every morning to receive the Cargo, being people who have just died on Earth. Then, a new popular astronaut Yuvishka, trained in cutting edge technology, is sent to join him on board. Watch the trailer here.
The dystopia science fiction film plays with a lot of notions, some as profound as the afterlife, the other ironic such as a demon stuck in a boring desk job. i.e Prahastha, who has a ‘Post-Death Transition Serves’ job, wherein he unloads ‘cargo’ (dead people) who are then ‘recycled’ (which involves healing them of their mortal wounds and diseases and erasing their memory) for their next incarnation. But the question it really seems to be asking is, does the identity of a person get erased when they leave earth in that form? Or does a speck of them remain behind?
Cargo is Arati Kadav’s debut feature film. It premiered at Mumbai Film Festival 2019, when the teaser of the film was also released. Watch below. The film was meant to have its international premiere at SXSW Film Festival running from 13 – 22 March 2020, which was the first casualty of the COVID pandemic.
Cargo is co-produced by Navin Shetty, Shloka Sharma, Arati Kadav and Anurag Kashyap with Vikramaditya Motwane serving as executive producer. It will release on Netflix on 9 September 2020.
