604

When her home is robbed, Saakshi goes after the prime suspects, who turn out to be Goa's ruthless mafia. She inadvertently causes a hot mess for the posh-gangster, Savannah, whose rare, hybrid strain of illicit seeds were mistakenly stolen in the robbery. Drawn into the crossfire chaos is James, on his first trip to India, after a mysterious phone call from his hippie brother, who insists James must come to meet him or "it will be too late". Out of her depth and struggling, Saakshi chases after an ever-elusive happiness, while trying to make a life in Goa’s hipster-paradise, where she, her lothario husband and their young child have moved from the Maximum City Mumbai, for a ‘better quality of life.” After the devastating robbery, Saakshi is further met with the utter collapse of any delusions she may hold about her life, her marriage or her place and position in her world of Goa’s societal hierarchy. Clueless, brave, or foolish, Saakshi is a woman on a mission, unafraid to take on her local systems of deep-seated corruption and power-wars to recover her stolen belongings. She risks losing everything - including possibly her mind - when things go dangerously wrong with the notorious local mafia, who, she discovers, are behind the robbery in her home. Savannah, a ruthless, elite, 'old-money' Goa-family-heiress, is on a do-or-die bender, jockeying for the 'boss lady' position in her crime-syndicate family. Unbeknownst to her powerful drug-lord father, who orchestrates the family empire from his wheelchair, Savannah has taken on a pair of mysterious American and Russian adversaries, in a sinister association of the highest possible stakes that threaten to destroy her family’s generations-old Goa enterprise and international operations. From the entitlement of her privileged position, and with her henchmen in tow, Savannah, the incendiary, deadly, agent-provocateur, unleashes a shockingly brutal carnage, the likes of which Goa has never seen before. Savannah will stop at nothing to assure her primacy over everything – and everyone – who dares to challenge her wanton, feral bid for power. James, an anxiety-ridden British academic, bludgeoned by life, and even more by his wife, escapes from his wilting marriage to Goa, on his first trip to India, to meet his hippie brother whom he has not seen in over two years. His journey to the most ‘far-out’ place away from the reality of his life, is James' last, wild, bid at an imagined freedom. James projects himself as an intellectual giant, but this is only to cover up for his inadequacies which are exacerbated by his bullying-wife, and a lifetime of meekly toe’ing any and every line he encounters. James wants to break free, but his landing into Goa is nowhere near the ‘life we dreamed of’ that his brother’s phone call had promised of the tropical paradise. While James searches for his brother, any compensatory vapours or remaining whiffs of belief in his own superiority are wiped out as events and experiences, both bizarre and profound as typical to India, literally take the life out of him. In a crisis moment that is fast becoming Saakshi's normal, she struggles to survive as the rug is repeatedly wrenched out from under her. Saakshi has to find the courage to pull herself up from the chaos of characters who surround her. She is tested to breaking point and forced to make decisions which land her, and anyone within her radius, in a life-or-death predicament. Will she make it? Or will she end up becoming yet another "Goa story"? These extraordinary characters spin out and collide into each other's orbits in a series of inconceivable circumstances which can happen "only in Goa". Everyone is looking for 'something', Saakshi for her stolen property, Savannah for her stolen seeds, and James for his missing brother. But, as it is revealed, their search is really to recover themselves, the search for a place and purpose in the world, the eternal search for meaning. Instead, they find themselves embroiled in a deadly, escalating crime spree, juxtaposed against Goa's comically infamous, hipster, pseudo-spirituality. Welcome to 604, this is as far out as it gets. You just have to take it one 'are you kidding me?' at a time. - - - - - - - Goa, the smallest state in India, is an international holiday destination renowned for its tropical beaches, pristine rural nature and, more recently, for its Electronic Dance Music culture. Goans are famous for "susegad", an easy-going, tolerant and friendly attitude. Over the years, Goa has increasingly become the perfect non-conformist's paradise, a 'get-away' for Indians, and an 'escape' for westerners, alike. "FullPower, 24hour, No Shave No Shower" was the mantra for three-day-long 'trance' parties on its beaches and jungles. And Goa became notorious in its post-hippie years for a quasi-spiritual, hedonistic, bohemian lifestyle. Add to this humanity's enduring search for meaning, and the persistent global belief that we in India have "the answer" (we do, but we're not telling) - plus hordes of Indian and international travellers on substances as gateways to 'self-knowledge'. What could possibly go wrong? These highly charged variables are called "604", a numerical code and epithet for "Goa". As used by the DJs, dealers, and local mafia, '604' can mean 'typical Goa', 'Goa life', 'only in Goa' - or 'what happens in Goa stays in Goa'. One aspect in all this seeming mayhem, which has never been explored before, is posited by the questions: What are the journeys and conflicts - good, bad or ugly - of the women who have flooded into Goa to find an alleged freedom? What do you get, when you turn a "chickflick" on its head and set it down in Goa? The unique vision of 604, is the anti-heroine's journey, an authentic tale of a singular, universal truth: the real lives, real loves, and real losses of very real women in India - and worldwide - are just the same. A common humanity (or is it 'insanity'?) unites us, and this commonality is the sweet-spot of 604. 604 is written as a provocative, stylish, comedy-drama, loaded with action, iconoclastic humour and a pulsating 'only in Goa' soundtrack. An original story, based on true events, set in the most global part of India, with a mixed cast of Indian, British and American characters, told by an Indian, female, filmmaker - in the language of a pan-India identity, 604 is a new kind of film, original all the way. A bunch of eccentric characters, pull you into the narrative and make you expect a thriller about a robbery and a dysfunctional couple - until rank ambition, the international drug-trade, music-culture and Goa-style-’spirituality’ take over and join forces to deliver the surreal and dynamic world of 604. In a Coen-Brothers-esque turn of dark-comedy inside its crime-thriller, 604 converges a cluster of outlandish characters in the 3rd-culture-capital of Goa, India, when a break-in-entry and grand-theft inadvertently plunges them into a cliffhanger, ‘rat-kingʼ entanglement — and leaves all, but one of them, dead. The characters of 604 are caught and enmeshed in each other's crossfire, against the backdrop of India's aspirational, fast and furious, sexy, new-money 'West Coast', as they hurtle towards a violent, all-out, bang-up, collision course. The story of 604 – and the lead character's conspiracy-theory-laden inner-world rife with dynamic – is revealed in inceptionary layers, during therapy sessions with a beautiful, mysterious, androgyne psychiatrist. In the search for their stolen belongings (or missing family members), 604 batter-rams its protagonists against the most ludicrous circumstances to crash-land into Goaʼs ever-famous, alleged gift of ‘self-knowledgeʼ. While deeply immersed in a local perspective, with a clear outlook to a global resonance, 604 is a “glocal” 3rd-culture-story from India aimed at our wider world. The story's dark, comedic tonal design, playfully mashes-up genres — crime, action, psychological thriller, and socio-cultural satire – to comment on the zeitgeist of our human condition. Cinéma-as-vérité-as-it-gets, 604 is storytelling about lives that hang by a thread in perilous, hilarious, shocking and yet entirely relatable circumstances. 604 is independent, new-Indian-cinema, aimed to yield an electric, pulp-fiction, cinematic experience.