Tales from Planet Kolkata is a personal film about a city that may only exist in a film or on TV; a film about various dreams about Calcutta. The film starts with a variation on the first image of Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW and takes the spectator along through a strange file full of ideas and images of the city. Some images come from the North - Hollywood films and European television, others are poetic scans of architecture, an old mansion crumbling, another one being dismantled, of frantic traffic and a quiet neem tree. The commentry voice changes, the filmmaker himself, speaking to a recently dead friend, changing voices to mimic American radio or a French film-director. The film also has a traditional patachitrakar, a scroll-painter unfurling a different history of colonialism and the continuing media-colonisation of Calcutta. A third commentator is an Afro-American video-artist from New York. Through these voices and images the dark city imagined by western media is spoofed while another, far more rooted sadness is suggested.