Film and Television Institute of India

FTII Diploma film by Mani Kaul

Once upon a time in a village, an old lady steals the rooster and the sun never rises again.

People are involved in daily encounters without ever being aware of how they are connected with one another. A taxi reveals all.

Three young men are putting up an antenna for their amateur radiostation in a city tower block. They want to connect to the ISS space station, which orbits the globe, which they succeed in doing. In return the astronauts report on the weather to their entire audience. In the meantime, the young man who holds the antenna eavesdrops on several people talking about all sorts of things.

An act of violence resonates through the night, touching upon the lives of different characters, who otherwise would not necessarily exist in each other’s daily narrative. The story is seen through the self contained world of seven characters as they drift along the otherwise mundane night meandering around the graphical symmetry of a ‘modern’ city. The story is based on excerpts taken from a novel by Haruki Murakami by the same name

The story deals with a professional hitman, who falls in love with the woman he sets out to murder.

Set in 1944, against the backdrop of Mahatma Gandhi's visit to a village, it is the story of a mother who faces a crisis and whose faith in Gandhi's message is put to test.

An ethnographic film exploring the legend of Mahadeo Koli Goddess Kalsu, whose presence remains impregnated in the consciousness of the women of the tribe today.

Sea of Lost Time is an allegory set in an undefined time and space, evoking the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, inspired by his characters. A soldier comes back from the dead to a seaside village. He reminisces on the time lost while he was away, like a sea between his past and the dysfunctional present. Through him we discover a motley of characters: a rag-tag musical band, a man locked up inside an abandoned horse stable, his sister, also the soldier’s lover and who has been bemoaning the loss. An impressionistic view of the intertwined lives of those inhabiting imaginary spaces, with an underpinning of social and political metaphors.

An elderly couple lives a mundane life in a remote village in Assam.An atmosphere of absence pervades their household. One morning, a young boy comes to sell winter clothes and talks about his home which is three states away. A pleasant breeze signals the subtle change of season and hints towards a solitary time packed with memories of youth.

Three siblings, brother Dinu and two sisters Anu and Buri meet on a seashore one morning after their mother's death. They reminiscence about their mother and her relentless journey in search of 'home'. Gradually as they dwell through their personal memories of 'mother' they unknowingly enter into unknown dark zones of mother and their own lives. The spirits of their ancestors too become part of their stories as the two sisters preform their memories. Dreams, fantasies, memories and reality starts to overlap to form a complex image of 'mother' in search of home.

Ambika has just come to know that she has failed once again, and she will not be given any more chances. At first, she leaves the city for her home in another city. But very soon the city takes over and her confusions return even more intensely this time.

Through faces and bodies of real life labourers emerges an epistolary account of a daily wage owner who suddenly finds himself out of work one day. As rampant industrialisation surges, a new class is born - a crowd of nomadic migrant workers whose lives are a series of transitions in search of work. Folk tale and memory as witnesses to this rapidly changing world through their eyes.

Kaki is a 60-year-old widow who lives with her Nepali maid, Malti. The film takes place on one afternoon in their house where a flower blossoms in the balcony. Malti meets a boy (a sailor) from her hometown unexpectedly.

Documentary chronicling the 101 year old ex Mr. Universe Manohar Aich

Madhav, a playful 8-year-old boy who has spent most of his time playing outdoors in the village, is being sent to town for educational purposes.

Due to the caste dynamics and hierachy prevailing in Golegaon as in the rest of the country, the Adivasi people in the village struggle to hold onto their traditions and assert their own individual identity as a community in the very place that has belonged to them for generations.

Tackling the theme of identity from the perspective of Asian and Afro-Caribbean actors, the film emerged from an acting workshop exploring the relationship between acting idioms in theatre and cinema led by Kumar Shahani and Alaknanda Samarth.