Payal Kapadia has become the first Indian filmmaker to win the Grand Prix award at Cannes for All We Imagine as Light. But beyond her debut film that eloquently narrativises about Indian sisterhood, we are also celebrating two Indian films that were showcased at Cannes 2024—which won first (Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know) and third prize (Bunnyhood) in the La Cinef Selection.
Directed by Chidananda S Naik, a student at The Film and Television Institute of India, Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know is a 15-minute film that tackles questions of fate, belief and human desperation. The trailer opens with a group of men looking up at the sky with a voiceover in the background speaking in Kannada: “One fine morning, the village rooster didn’t crow at all,” says the voice. “From that day on, the sun stopped rising.” The trailer doesn’t give away much but leaves you with some discomfort as two hooded figures walking through a forest with lamps in their hands turn in unison to look at something behind them.
Why are the men in the trailer looking up at the sky? They’re in search of the sun. Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know is based on a Kannada folktale about a woman who steals the village’s prized rooster, plunging her people into perpetual midnight. The villagers embark on a frenetic quest to retrieve the missing bird and restore daylight. Shot entirely at night, the film feels both intriguing and foreboding.
Despite the folktale being popular in his home state, Naik discovered that most people outside Karnataka were unfamiliar with it. “My dream has been to transform the myths and folktales of India into cinematic experiences, and with such a wealth of stories waiting to be told, this short film feels like the perfect place to start,” he told The Hindu in an interview. The director’s hope is that we reference India’s rich repository of myths and legends in conversation as often as we do Greek philosophy.
Being honoured by a platform like Cannes—and clinching the top prize in the category he was nominated for—is a victory hard-earned for Naik who revealed to Variety that he was told to not make Sunflowers Were the First Ones at all. “We had only four days to shoot,” said the 29-year-old director in the interview, “but these are the stories we grew up with and I had been carrying this idea since my childhood.”
Don’t let the name Bunnyhood fool you into thinking that Mansi Maheshwari’s film is even remotely cute or fluffy; in fact, it leans into the “evil bunny” archetype pretty heavily. The trailer for the animated film, which bagged third place at Cannes 2024 in the La Cinef Selection, feels like a fever dream on acid. It unsettles the viewers right off the bat, beginning with a mother’s announcement to her daughter, “We’re going to Big Patties” supported by a jarring guitar riff and scratchy illustrations. The burger joint appears on-screen for a split second before the mum’s voiceover is heard again: “It’s just a check-up, trust me”. Then, the scene is taken over by looming malevolent figures and a doctor in scrubs, all of whom transform into bunnies and thrust a needle into the girl.
Maheshwari, who hails from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh and has been studying in the UK, says that the idea for Bunnyhood came to her from an incident that occurred in her childhood, where her mother lied about an appendix surgery she had to undergo. It was one of the first lies she heard in her life and the memory of it has lingered through adulthood. “I’ve always struggled with understanding why people feel the need to lie, and its consequences. The story of my appendix surgery was the perfect choice to explore this theme,” she said in an interview with Directors Notes.
Maheshwari wanted each frame of Bunnyhood to look like a vintage flyer so she drew the whole film on A5 sheets using a simple ballpoint pen and scanned each frame on the photocopy machine at the National Film and Television School in England, where she is currently a student. That sure sounds like a lot of paper but a Cannes honour means her school won’t mind too much. “I love animating and I wanted to spend my year at college doing something that I loved,” the 25-year-old said in an interview with Hindustan Times, adding that her vision for Bunnyhood provided the perfect setting for blending horror and comedy. “Since the storyline was sorted, it gave me the freedom to play around with not just the technique but also the frames and sound. This film was born out of experimentation.”
In addition to All We Imagine as Light, Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know and Bunnyhood, the other Indian films to premiere at Cannes 2024 are British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s Santosh starring Shahana Goswami; Shyam Benegal’s Manthan, which won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi in 1976; Sister Midnight directed by Karan Kandhari and starring Radhika Apte; In Retreat directed by Syed Maisam Ali Shah; The Shameless, which although directed by Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov, is set in India and Nepal; and Kooki, a Hindi film from Assam directed by Pranab J. Deka. Rounding off this list is Anasuya Sengupta, who has just made history by becoming the first Indian to win Best Actress at Cannes for her role in The Shameless, in which she plays a sex worker who escapes from prison after killing a cop. It really is a standout year for India—and Indians—at the most prestigious film festival in the world.
This article was first published in Vogue India.
