On Thursday at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, Chidananda S Naik’s Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know won the first prize of La Cinef for best short, a major win for Bharat.
The first prize for Chidananda is Bharat’s second in five years. Ashmita Guha Neogi, also from FTII, won the award for her film CatDog in 2020.
Chidananda said, ‘We had only four days and I was told not to make this film. It’s based on folklore from Karnataka. I was carrying this idea since my childhood as these are the stories we grew up with’.
The moviemaker made the film at the end of his one-year course in the television wing of the Film and Television Institute of India.
The film is based on a Kannada folk tale about an old woman who steals a rooster, plunging her village into perpetual darkness.
The Cannes Film Festival awards a 15,000 euro grant to the first prize winner. The 16-minute short fiction film premiered at the film festival on Tuesday afternoon.
Sunflowers Were the Last Ones to Know was one of 18 titles judged by a five-member jury chaired by Belgian actress Lubna Azabal. The third prize in the La Cinef competition went to Mansi Maheshwari’s animation film Bunnyhood.
Mansi was born in Meerut and is an ex-student of NIFT Delhi, she made the film as a student of UK’s National Film and Television School. The film festival awards a 7,500 euro grant to the third prize recipient.
The second prize was shared by Out of the Widow Through the Wall, directed by Columbia University’s Asya Segalovich, and The Chaos She Left Behind, made by Nikos Kolioukos of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
The Cannes Film Festival awards an 11,250 euro grant to the second prize winner. The awarded films will be screened at the Cinema du Pantheon on June 3 and at the MK2 Quai de Seine on June 4.
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