In a remote village in South India, three generations of sons react to the death of Century Gowda, their grandfather, a 101-year-old man. The three story lines intertwine before converging at Century Gowda's "Thithi", the final funeral celebration eleven days after a death.
Spring 1989. High up in the Indian Himalayas, where even the birds fly low to avoid getting lost in the clouds, the soft-spoken Dev owns a sprawling estate of several orchards and lives in a colonial-style house with his family. He spends a lot of his time building human-sized wings which he puts on to take a quick morning flight over his land. One day, while walking through the estate, he discovers a single burnt apple tree. A few days later, more trees are burnt. Dev and his manager monitor the workers on the plantations and this leads to unrest. A group of nomads comes under suspicion and a corrupt police officer gets involved, while loyal men camp out in the orchards to keep a vigilant watch at night. Despite all these measures, a massive fire breaks out a week later and engulfs an entire mountainside of trees. In his search for the culprit, Dev resorts to armed violence. The slow burning of the orchards forces him to face the truth about himself and his family.
One’s own family is not always easy. In Berlin, Cologne and the Ghanaian Accra, we go in search with afro-german Akosua of her own identity and belonging in a multicultural context.
