There are films that approach diaspora through nostalgia, and then there are films that explore it through quieter ruptures. The uneasy return to a place that once felt like home carries the weight of unspoken stories spanning continents. Calorie, Eisha Marjara’s deeply personal drama about a Sikh-Canadian family navigating grief, distance, and the fragile labor of reconnection, firmly belongs in the latter category. Winner of Best Feature, Best Director, and Best Actor during its Canadian premiere at the IFFSA Toronto Festival, the film went on to have its Indian premiere at the 56th International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Goa, in the Cinema of the World section, a fitting showcase for a work rooted in emotion and memory.
Monika Singh (Ellora Patnaik), a hardworking architect raising two teenage daughters in suburban Canada, is stretched thin by deadlines, as well as by old wounds she has never named aloud, and by children who have begun drifting beyond her reach. Alia (Shanaya Dhillon-Birmhan), thirteen, funnels her anxiety into rigid control over her body, while seventeen-year-old Simi (Ashley Ganger), headstrong and restless, is already rehearsing her escape. When the girls travel to the city of Amritsar in India to spend the summer with their Aunt Gurdeep (Dolly Ahluwalia) and Uncle Mohan (Anupam Kher), what should have been a restorative holiday becomes a reckoning. The trip ignites a wave of cultural dislocation, unravels long-buried family secrets, and exposes the jagged edges of adolescence—all colliding under the roof of a house where old wounds linger quietly in the corners, waiting to be acknowledged.
Calorie is shaped around the intergenerational echoes of trauma centering around the Air India Flight 182 bombing and the aftershocks of Operation Blue Star. Marjara grounds the film’s emotional core in one of the most devastating acts of extremist violence on Canadian soil, tracing how a national tragedy can reverberate with intimate force. She shows how history embeds itself in the lives of those left behind. A scab may form, but the wound beneath refuses to heal. In Monika’s struggle to live with her mother’s demise, the film reflects the broader, aching grief of a community still carrying the weight of that loss. It suggests that personal mourning and national memory are often inseparable.
These events aren’t treated as distant history but as spectral presences, shaping the emotional landscape of Monika’s adulthood. Through her character, the filmmaker captures the exhaustion of a woman who has spent decades surviving by compartmentalizing. Her eventual confrontation with what she has withheld, from herself and her daughters, provides the film with its most affecting passages. Moreover, Mohan’s quiet habit of writing poems he never shares becomes one of the film’s most evocative motifs. We see him composing in Gurmukhi on a glowing computer screen, yet the verses remain unheard, suspended in a private space shaped by memory, guilt, and the weight of a past he cannot bring himself to articulate. When young Alia, moved by his discipline, writes and recites a poem of her own, the moment offers an elegant contrast. While Mohan is silenced by unresolved trauma, Alia, raised far from the event’s immediate fallout, finds the courage to give her feelings form. Through this generational shift, the film suggests that expression, once stifled, can find renewed life in those unburdened by the same shadows.
Although Calorie sometimes falters under the weight of its many themes, including body-image anxieties, adolescent rebellion, cultural estrangement, and lingering grief, it remains committed to its vision. The film consistently focuses on the emotional landscape it seeks to explore. The writing is uneven in certain scenes, and several subplots fade before they fully register. Yet even when the narrative wavers, the film’s sincerity remains steady. There is something disarming about the way the film reaches for connection. It is never overly sentimental, offering instead an honesty that honours the messiness of family. In its final stretch, when the emotional walls finally crack, it showcases a director capable of crafting conflict that feels both intimate and earned.
Ellora Patnaik, as Monika, anchors the emotional centre with a performance marked by restraint and aching vulnerability. Shanaya Dhillon-Birmhan and Ashley Ganger bring a raw immediacy to Alia and Simi, respectively. The two daughters navigate the uneven, often overwhelming pressures of growing up in a family still learning how to speak its truths. Kher and Ahluwalia, both superb, lend their scenes a textured tenderness that grounds the film’s more diffuse narrative strands.
Christophe Dalpé and Marc Simpson-Threlford capture the sensory density of a city, as well as the confining intimacy of interiors where memory and modernity often coexist uneasily. The modest production design by Patricia Christie is evident, but never limiting; if anything, it underscores the film’s grounded, domestic heartbeat. Paul Chotel’s editing allows moments to breathe, lingering on unhurried glances, overheard conversations, and the tentative warmth of a household adjusting to new rhythms. The sound design by René Portillo, Martyne Morin, and Alexis Pilon Gladu deepens this atmosphere, layering the film with textures that subtly echo its themes of displacement, longing, and hard-won connection.
Calorie may not have the tidiest structure or the sharpest dialogue, but its emotional integrity is unmistakable. Marjara has crafted a story about the quiet work of mending, between mothers and daughters, between past and present, between the people we were and the people we hope to become. And in its gentlest moments, the film offers something rare. The sense that healing, however incomplete, is possible when silence finally gives way to truth.
Calorie will be released in theatres across Canada on November 28, 2025.
