I'm disillusioned with modernity, says filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak

'Difficult' may be a damning adjective when used for an artist but it is often rightly so. Much of what goes in the name of art today - especially in conceptual, new media practices - is simply incomprehensible. Very rarely does one encounter a 'difficult' work of art that is also 'rewarding', that engrosses and befuddles, that compels even as it escapes full comprehension. Ashish Avikunthak's film Rati Chakravyuh is one such.

It is, as critic Niru Ratnam wrote in her profile of Avikunthak in Art Review magazine, which last year put him on its list of 'Future Greats', wrote, "(a) self consciously difficult work filmed in a self-consciously beautiful way".

The entire film, shot in one long, 98-minute take, is a conversation, with the camera moving around a static tableaux - a group of young people, dressed in wedding finery, elaborate sandalwood design on forehead and cheeks, sitting in a circle, talking. They speak slowly, dreamily, one after the other, each interlocutor taking from what was said before, as if in a ritual or a game. Who are these men and women, what is the point of the conversation?

The artist's note, usually meant to provide a cue to viewers, does not help. "On a lunar eclipsemidnight, in a desolate temple, six young newlywed couples and a priestess meet after a mass wedding," it says. "They sit in a circle and talk. This is their last conversation – an exchange about life, death, beginning, end and everything in between. After a discussion that lasts more than an hour and a half, they commit mass suicide." Why they kill themselves, how they do so - the film doesn't show, and the conversation doesn't give a clue. But, somehow, the answers do not matter. One is drawn into the exchange, which explore arcane philosophies and myths about the nature of the world, life, death and birth. They hint at a deeper truth, that modern reason and logic fail to articulate, that can only be grasped in the apparently irrational, poetic imagination of pre-modern thinkers.

"I am very disillusioned with modernity. If one is to live in the world, modernity does not help much. I do not see much hope, any course to redemption in modernity," says Avikunthak.

This is a telling admission for someone who lives and teaches in the West, the flag-bearer of modernity. Avikunthak is assistant professor of film media at the University of Rhode Island, taught at Yale earlier and did his PhD from Stanford.

Interestingly, despite all the acclaim his films have gathered - they have been screened at Tate Modern, Pompidou Centre – Avikunthak is no trained film-maker. His academic qualifications are in archaeology and cultural anthropology. It was at the Deccan College, where he moved after a graduating in social work from Mumbai, that he was introduced to ancient Indian philosophy, whether of the Tantrik or Upanishadic tradition.

It permeates his cinema, which Avikunthak dubs the "cinema of religiosity". His latest, Kalkimanthankatha, which will be screened at Mumbai's Chatterjee & Lal gallery in July, is about two men who go to the Mahakumbh in 2013 looking for Vishnu's elusive tenth avatar. Katho Upanishad (2011) dramatises this key Upanishad, where Yama imparts the secrets of life and death to Nachiketa, and Vakratunda Swaha (2010) plays on the form of the Ganesh icon, on making and unmaking, life and death, ritually enacted through idol immersion.

Avikunthak, is now in Varanasi working on his next, something on the idea of "alienation in relationships that moves between Kolkata, Brindavan, and Benaras".

Kolkata, says Avikunthak, is "very important to me". All his films - barring two - are in Bengali, the language, people and culture he feels closest to, even though he is a Punjabi. Ashish Chaddha is his actual name, and Avikunthak, a pseudonym he took on in school when he began writing poetry because he liked the sound of it. "I come from a Partition family who settled in Kolkata in the 1960s. I grew up around Kalighat."

Avikunthak's introduction to films happened in Kolkata, at the city's famed film clubs and societies, and continued through his move to Mumbai, where he would hang out with friends at the FTII. Along the way, he was also a left-wing political activist and worked with Medha Patkar in Narmada Bachao Andolan.

Does a diverse life, a multiplicity of experience lead to a richer, more layered art? Looking at Avikunthak's films, it would definitely seem so.