Justin Rao sits down with Konkona Sen Sharma at the Nilaya Monsoon Film Festival for a wide-ranging conversation about A Death in the Gunj — the film she still calls the most personal thing she has made. Adapted from a short story her father Mukul Sharma told her from the age of seven, about a false prophecy of death that a young man made come true, it began as a three-act piece she wrote for herself with no expectation that anyone would fund it or watch it, a freedom Konkona says shaped every choice in it. She talks about a childhood in which her mother Aparna Sen insisted she read the Ramayana and the Mahabharata before watching them on television, why boredom and delayed gratification built her attention, and how a decade of acting on other people's sets taught her to be comfortable in chaos long before she stood behind the camera. Konkona also unpacks the film's most talked-about sequences — the leaves the crew gathered and laid out by hand, the seance that plays like horror before it is revealed as an elaborate prank, and the search across for a real colonel's house with the exact geography she had drawn on paper. She discusses casting Vikrant Massey, Tillotama Shome, Ranvir Shorey, Kalki Koechlin, Om Puri and Tanuja, why she has never cast herself in her own films, and the practical reason she directs so rarely: she has to write the script first. The conversation moves to The Mirror, her Lust Stories 2 segment co-written with Pooja Tolani, and the casteism she says hides behind the language of hygiene; to Geeli Pucchi and the bruised man she found inside herself; to the horror film about motherhood she keeps threatening to write; and to Welcome to Khoya Mahal, the seven-episode series she is co-directing with Jaydeep Sarkar and currently editing. The session closes with an audience Q&A. #KonkonaSenSharma #ADeathInTheGunj #THRIndia