Prashant Bhargava, the director of Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, a film that featured music by Vijay Iyer released in the autumn of 2014, has died in New York.

A film that included footage taken during the Holi festival in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh marking a journey of devotion for the goddess Radha, Omer Mozaffar on film website rogerebert.com paid tribute to Bhargava referring to Radhe Radhe as a work “synthesizing East and West into a way that embodied his own life experiences”. The Chicagoan was 42. His feature film debut was Patang, a work that followed the fortunes of six people during India’s largest kite festival in Ahmedabad.