Student shortlisted for Cannes
Sunflowers Were The First To Know, a short film made by four students from the TV branch of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), has been chosen for the 77th Cannes Film Festival’s La Cinef category. La Cinef, an organization dedicated to identifying up-and-coming talent from throughout the globe, has selected 18 shorts for its 27th edition out of 2,263 applications from film schools worldwide.
The film’s writer and director, Chidananda S, enrolled at FTII for a one-year TV course after his MBBS from Mysore Medical College.”I thought it might be a prank at first when I received a mail from the artistic director of Cannes,” he recalls. I was a student in 2022 and I belong to the 2020 class. I didn’t keep in contact with the college after I graduated last year, so I didn’t know whether the movie had been sent to Cannes. I
was unaware that we would be picked for this esteemed segment in Cannes, where our alumnus Payal Kapadia was chosen a few years before, since the selection procedure is private. I’ve been working on a feature picture for the last year.”
“I’m from Karnataka and the Banjara community; folk tales and oral traditions are part of our heritage,” he explains, talking about the plot of the movie. I chose to go back to my origins when we were tasked with creating a short film, and this folktale was a tale worth sharing.”
The cast included three FTII students and a few Kannada actors who traveled to Pune for the film’s production.
“Since it’s a student film, our timeline, budget, and other requirements were all in line with the curriculum,” he states. However, the atmosphere was quite different, with everyone eager to share the tale.”
La Cinef has selected 18 shorts (four animated and fourteen live-action) for its 27th season, out of 2,263 applications from film schools worldwide.
According to Cannes, “This year’s programme reflects the geographic mobility of film students, with a Singaporean director in Australia, an Indian and a Lithuanian in the UK, a Russian in the Czech Republic, and three shorts made at American schools by Russian, Chinese, and British filmmakers.”
The narrative of the short film Sunflowers Were the First to Know tells the tale of an elderly lady who steals the village’s cherished rooster, inciting unrest and driving her family into exile. Chidananda S. Naik is the film’s director; Suraj Thakur took the pictures; Manoj V edited it; and Abhishek Kadam did the sound design.
This is the only Indian film that has been chosen for Cannes’ La Cinef section.
