From the writer-director, Prashant
What if the Creator was all-powerful only until the moment of creation — and after that could only watch?
In 2020 I read a news report about a very young child who had been raped. One image from it never left me: a vase, broken. For years, every time I read about something like it — especially when the victim was a child — the same question returned: isn’t the Creator seeing this?
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We have always imagined the Creator as almighty. Would we still pray to one who could only watch? Would we still follow a Creator who can be hurt — even killed?
I was afraid to write it. In my first draft I kept that image out, because I didn’t believe I had the maturity to handle something this sensitive. By the second or third draft, I knew I wasn’t being honest to the thing that had started it all. So I stopped writing and started learning — about the lives of survivors, and about philosophy. Eight to ten months, thirteen drafts, fifteen by the time we shot.
I set the film in one white room and fifteen minutes because I don’t believe more time would change anything. Give us fifteen years, or fifteen decades, and the questions that matter would still go unanswered. The white room is a void. There will always be a void. And the Creator — young, dressed in white — may not have the power to stop what happens in the world, but she chooses to feel all of it.
A koan is a question that seems absurd, but leads somewhere true. The First Murderer is mine.
