Eyes Shall Deceive is a 30-minute film that reflects on the musical folklore stemming from contemporary urban India. Shot on 16mm film, mostly after dusk in Kolkata, Varanasi, and Mumbai, it weaves live performances—brass band, Vedic chants, percussion ensembles—accompanied by a live group of musicians. The sound extends beyond the screen into the cinema hall, where performers deepen the audience’s sense of proximity to Indian music.

Sound design anchors the film’s overarching theme, Rites of Passage. It signifies rituals or activities that mark an individual’s transition from darkness to vision, solitude to community, departure to arrival. Music also emerges as a ritual along with everyday acts of gathering in often alienating urban settings, as people seek connection through collective listening. In the liminal hours, birth chants mingle with sweeping, washing, preparation and ordinary gestures elevated to rhythmic rites.

Performers drift in dreamlike transience, their fleeting assemblies carving intimacy amid migrant, fractured urban sprawl. Echoing Bhakti poets like Kabir and Gorakhnath, the film claims the unfinished night as a realm of uncertainty, reflection, possibility, where the notions of real and the imagined are in continuous negotiation.

The film brings innovation to the Science Museum not through technology but form. It proposes a cinema that is not simply watched but collectively lived by collapsing distinctions between film and live performances.