Khichdi

Khichdi traces the interwoven histories of four First-Generation Indian women who live in the UK and have been working for the NHS since the early 2000s. Set around a dinner table, the film foregrounds the stories of the director’s mother and aunties who reunite over a shared meal to reminisce upon their decades-long friendship and careers.

Through intimate hand-held shots, this film reveals their close bonds, forged from a love of nursing and caregiving at the Frances Newton Mission Hospital in Ferozepur, Punjab, where the women trained in the 1980s, and their shared experiences of nursing from training together in India to settling in Britain. Insertions of animations, paintings, khichdi making and family-archive footage thread together in this experimental documentary as the women reflect upon sisterhood, service and migration through their deep ties to the NHS and its impression upon their lives. This is one of three films funded as part of 'NHS Untold Film Stories'. Funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, in partnership with the BFI, these new films tell the untold stories of the NHS, taking audiences on a journey across the UK and as far afield as India, to mark 75 years since the NHS was established in 1948. In 2023, the selected emerging filmmakers were awarded up to £20,000 each to make these new short films inspired by the BFI National Archive’s NHS on Film collection. The films either respond directly to the archive NHS on Film collection or creatively reuse extracts from a curated selection of films preserved by BFI to reflect on the gaps in the story of the NHS as told through film. The three films funded as part of this scheme are: 1. Khichdi, dir. Sara David 2. Every Moment Counts, dir. Dermot O’Dempsey 3. Dr XYZ, dir. El Jones and Raviv Piccus