Rajit Kapoor Returns As Detective In 'Kaisi Ye Paheli,' Filmmaker Ananyabrata Chakravorty’s Heart-Tugging Hill-Town Thriller

A film that sees Rajit Kapoor back as a Bengali detective after his iconic role in Byomkesh Bakshi and the comeback of Nadiya Ke Paar actor Sadhana Singh, Kaisi Ye Paheli is a nod to women and mothers, in particular.

A filmmaker from Assam, now based in Mumbai, Ananyabrata Chakravorty has studied engineering and MBA and worked in the IT sector for six years before starting a career in the film industry in 2016. Interestingly, before this, he made two short films—90 to Win and Naukri, wrote lyrics for a Ricky Martin song, authored the novel Split Second, and played a freedom fighter in The Waking of a Nation by Ram Madhvani. While he was always interested in films, he admits that he cannot really tell at what point he realised that I wanted to make one. “Maybe it was gradual and didn’t happen one fine day or because of one film in particular,” he says.

His two short films have been successful too. 90 to Win, my first short film, is about a man trying to crack a simpler and more accessible algorithm for rain-affected cricket matches. It’s based on an algorithm that his friend Sourav Agarwalla and he created back during engineering, hoping that it would someday replace the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern Method. “We couldn’t, so in fiction, our protagonist did,” he smiles. His nine-minute short, Naukri, was an attempt to make an earth-based sci-fi set in the near future. “In a way, it was my attempt at making a very short Black Mirror episode on a shoestring budget,” he adds.

If you think that packed a punch, there is more. Currently, he is all set with Kaisi Ye Paheli (released in theatres on November 28, 2025), his debut feature film as a writer-director. “Much like most children I grew up around, I got interested in movies as a child because they are fun and interesting. As a child, I loved the films that had magic in them—like Mr India, Chamatkar and Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. In my teens, I loved all things Shah Rukh Khan and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and then in the 2010s, I fell more in love with Hitchcock, Fincher, and Nolan,” he says.

His movie, Kaisi Ye Paheli, is set in a sleepy hill town in northeast India and is about a lonely mother who tries to reconnect with her estranged policeman son by channelling her inner detective to help him solve a murder. “That’s the logline. At the core, it’s about old-age loneliness and a broken mother-son bond,” he adds. Sukant Goel, who is known for his roles in films like Kaala Paani, Ghost Stories, and Monica O My Darling, is the male lead in the film.

Interestingly, this movie premiered at the New York Indian Film Festival, and Chakravorty says the experience was incredible. “The way the audience responded to every note of the film—the drama, the comedy, and the reveal at the end, it was extraordinary. It was a huge validation and inspired the move to take it to the theatres.”

As an author, lyricist, and actor, apart from being a director, Chakraborty admits that he does not multitask. “I try to approach them one at a time. Screenwriting is my favourite art form. I try to approach direction and acting through my understanding of screenwriting. They are all related,” he says. Looking ahead, Chakravorty aims to film more stories that he really wants to tell.