Finding Sumanth

Profile of a young filmmaker

Jul 13, 2024

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🙏This is the story of Sumanth Bhat, an up and coming filmmaker. I would encourage you to see Sumanth’s work for yourself. Here is an easy way to do so. Thank you.

October 2022

Thirty-eight-year-old filmmaker Sumanth Bhat has already lived with Mithya, his debut feature, as an idea for months and for a further year getting it made into a film when he and Bhuvanesh, his editor, find themselves without a room at the Marriott in Panjim, Goa.

The 2022 NFDC Film Bazaar organizers have no rooms at the festival hotel to offer them for their session with Clémence Carré, the French editor supposed to help take Mithya to its polished final cut. Though these editing slots were assigned beforehand, the sudden arrival of a VIP at the festival has thrown a spanner in the works.

A couple of hours earlier, as the Work-in-Progress (WIP) Lab kicked off at the Film Bazaar, Sumanth had felt out of place seeing other filmmakers, editors, festival programmers milling around in the hotel lobby. In his sight lines: Rajshri Deshpande, Manoj Bajpai, and Prasoon Joshi; among famous names at the conference: Karan Johar. The unease had coursed unchecked all through the long briefing given to the director-editor pairs for the films selected for the WIP Lab section of the festival. Deepti D’Cunha, the festival programmer, had advised the young filmmakers to “let go of your child.” Listening to the stories of the other films in competition with his, Sumanth’s own struggles felt small.

It was a testimony to any filmmaker’s resourcefulness to be able to bootstrap a film, or—a financier willing—to mount a film on a limited budget. On top of that, to be one of five films of the year to be selected for the WIP Lab was a matter of prestige. It meant the chance to show a rough cut of their films to an eminent panel of international advisors and editors—the kind of break most young filmmakers would not have a fighting chance of getting.

Why then did filmmakers, year after year, blow this gilt-edged opportunity and walk out no-thank-you-very-much from the festival? Sumanth had heard from past invitees about the strange pairing of the thrill of being selected for the opportunity to show their film to a handpicked international panel with the dread of seeing it ripped apart in the one-on-one feedback sessions that ensued.

Sumanth was determined to not let that fate come to him. But he had no reason to believe that his predecessors were lacking in determination. The proof would be in the pudding, and at the moment he has no idea where they could sit and work with this French lady. It is late morning, a little past eleven. They only have Clémence for the first half of the day.

“Let’s do it in my room,” Clémence offers, seeing no other way out. She had landed in Goa the night before and is scheduled to mentor two projects, Sumanth’s and another one, on that day. “Give me a few minutes to put things in order.”

Clémence’s room is serviceable apart from the missing gear—a projector and a computer with editing software loaded on it. They—Sumanth, Bhuvanesh, and Clémence—improvise, setting up the edit line on Bhuvanesh’s laptop and playing the movie on the hotel television.

Housekeeping done, as Clémence makes herself coffee to jolt the jet lag out of her system, Sumanth eyes the stack of papers on the table: small heaps spiral bound and marked in red, black, and green ink, with notes scribbled in French along the margin. Sumanth knows no French but without knowing what those inked words say he’s sure of one thing: Clémence cares about his film.

2005

When Sumanth returned home to Brahmavara, on the outskirts of Udupi on the west coast of Karnataka, he was a freshly minted engineering graduate and one with a job. It was June 2005 and his joining date for Cognizant Technology Solutions was at the end of September. He was in this situation by design—four years as an undergrad at the prestigious RV College of Engineering in Bangalore followed by a successful placement at an MNC.

Circumstances had led him to another juncture. Sumanth had been steadily whetting his appetite for movie-watching. In seventeen days, in between his final term papers, he had watched twenty films. Earlier that year, Sumanth had joined Suchitra Film Society. Watching masterpieces like Shwaas (India’s official entry to the 2004 Oscars) and Akale in the company of cinephiles, he had started developing a taste for cinema. Now, all of this came to bear when a stretch of three months at home loomed before him.

His father Devanand had sold off some ancestral property, and for the first time in Sumanth’s memory they had money to spare. He asked his father for a handycam under the pretext that it would be useful for chronicling family occasions. The camera cost a full forty-two thousand at the time, dearer than a two-wheeler. Perhaps it was the guilt of previous declinations to his son’s requests for things such as cricket coaching or perhaps he got caught up in the coattails of a feeling of “we can afford this now,” Sumanth’s father said yes.

Sumanth now had a Sony camcorder to play with. With his friend Shishir who faced a similar wait in Udupi before joining Tata Consultancy Services, they had the bases covered: Shishir had a computer; Sumanth had a handycam. Shishir could write rudimentary screenplays and edit the footage using Microsoft Movie Maker; Sumanth was keen to be behind the camera. Both would share acting and directorial responsibilities. Together, they made up Broken Mirror Productions.

The outcome of their teaming up over those monsoon months in 2005 was their first film, a thirty-five-minute short called Raahein. Scored to Gulzar’s poetry from his 1999 album Marasim, not everything worked in the final product, yet there was no mistaking that what drove it was a young gusto.

October 2022

Four sheaves stack up on Clémence’s table—one each for the four international mentors who had over the past couple of weeks seen the movie and shared their observations with Sumanth and Bhuvanesh. These sessions used to happen at the festival, compressed into a hectic few days, but this time the organizers had decided to change the format and have the mentor sessions virtually, a few weeks before.

Sumanth remembers what Marie-Pierre Duhamel, mentor number three assigned for his film and veteran curator of film festivals, had said: “I don’t know what I’m going to say on this call because I really liked the film.” His own favorite, though, is the seventy-year-old Marco Mueller, former director of the Venice, Rome, and Locarno film festivals and someone whose opinion on independent Indian films carried heft on the international festival circuit. “This is a very important film for India,” Marco had said.

What could those inked comments mean, Sumanth wonders, as Clémence places her coffee down. “These are all notes for the comments from each of the mentors,” she says, catching his gaze. “Let me take you through them.”

A short hour passes before they are through Clémence’s comments. She doesn’t see eye to eye with all the changes suggested by the mentors. That loosens up Sumanth because he feels not all the advisors, especially Ming from South Korea, got the cultural nuances of his film.

Clémence is thorough, as thorough as someone who has pored over the recordings of Sumanth’s sessions with the mentors minute by minute can be. So, when she says something about the rhythm of the movie, Sumanth is all attention. He has seen the film so many times that he feels he has lost perspective, and hearing something new from Clémence makes him sit up. What does she mean by rhythm?

Mithya is the story of Mithun, nicknamed Mithya, an eleven-year-old boy who’s struggling to come to terms with the recent deaths of both his parents. It is the loss of his mother, which is left unexplained and which triggers unhealthy conjecture among the extended family, that rankles him the most. In Sumanth’s edit, Mithya’s struggle shows itself in scenes with his aunt, who has adopted him, and her husband and daughter. Time and again, the boy is shown walking away, angry, upset, bitter.

“Leave him on screen and then cut,” suggests Clémence.

Clémence’s advice is to bottle the orphan’s pain and let it build up, hurt by hurt, scene by scene. Until that moment, the fact had slid by unnoticed. Now, as Sumanth and Bhuvanesh try out Clémence’s suggestion, it is unmistakable. By closing down access to release, the rhythm of the movie has changed. Mithya, the eleven-year-old orphan, is wound up like a clock.

By the time they are done, it is several hours later in the afternoon. They have been able to go through two-thirds of the film, picking out scenes to weed out in their search for cadence. Through the rest of the day and the next, Sumanth and Bhuvanesh have their work cut out for them, in making the changes, but the nerves of the morning are gone. Sumanth walks out of Clémence’s room famished, with a spring in his stride.

Three days later, on the Sunday the festival wraps up, Mithya wins two awards: the Best Film in the WIP Lab category and a grant for color grading. Elsa Charbit, one of the jury members and a former programmer for Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, seeks out Sumanth in the crowd to tell him how much she enjoyed the film.

2006–2008

In less than a year of joining Cognizant, Sumanth had learned how to code; been put on a project (instead of on the proverbial bench); and fashioned a life outside of work that involved watching movies, reading about them, and fiddling around with his Sony camcorder. A busy job meant he came to value his time away from it even more dearly and set aside as much of it as was possible to feed his growing love for films.

In Bangalore, Sumanth had been reunited with Shishir, who after a period of training at Hyderabad, had returned to the city. They rented a place along with Sumanth’s elder brother and a rotation of flatmates. They wanted to replicate the gusto of their first foray into filmmaking from the previous year and would bounce ideas for short films off each other.

In 2007 they made Dwandwa, their second short. On an evening commute home, a white-collar biker gives a ride to a stranger, and immediately begins to question the decision. The short film captures the dilemma of a rider who wants to be a good samaritan to a stranded hitchhiker on a deserted road at night and yet cannot help but fear for his personal safety. For Dwandwa, they convinced a friend to play one of the leads, Shishir being the other. For the first time, they shot in their native Kannada. Dwandwa tapped into a creative vein. In the months that followed Sumanth and Shishir submitted three films for a one-minute short film festival. The duo followed it up with a fifteen-minute short about a man on the road trying to relieve himself—To Pee or Not to Pee.

When Sumanth wasn’t shooting films or directing them, he was watching films or spending hours on Passion for Cinema (PFC), a portal that had quickly emerged as a hotbed for radical filmmaking in the country. Films for him were an enticing though alien world that PFC brought him closer to. Pioneering indie figure Anurag Kashyap, then cresting a new wave with films such as Black Friday and Gulaal, used to write on the site. When Sumanth commented on one of Kashyap’s blog posts, he felt as if he were conversing with an idol.

Around that time, another youth from Udupi making his living in software—Rakshit Shetty—was looking to break into Kannada films as an actor. Keen to build a body of work he could pitch to studios and filmmakers in Bangalore, he had out of necessity taken to writing screenplays in which he could cast himself. So, when through a mutual friend, Sumanth and Shishir found Rakshit, it was a dovetailing. Rakshit found a writer-director duo; Sumanth and Shishir found an actor for their films.

Bringing Rakshit in did not just give Sumanth and Shishir access to a trained actor for the first time in their collaboration, it brought with it a sense of freedom in the writing and an ingenuity in the execution of their project. Unable to afford lights, they shot with natural light. With no money to rent a location, they took over Rakshit’s aunt’s pad for a weekend. For the first time, too, they had an original song in the movie. Sumanth requested Varun Grover, then an upcoming dialog writer and lyricist whom Sumanth knew from PFC, to write him a song that he then got an acquaintance, a graduate of A R Rahman’s School of Music, to compose.

I Shot Myself was the trio’s most ambitious venture. It shows a young man played by Rakshit capturing himself on camera as he goes about his days in an apartment. It has a stream-of-consciousness feel like in The Martian. But unlike the scientist who’s trapped on an alien planet and makes video blogs to keep his spirits up, the protagonist in I Shot Myself is trapped in the ennui of a life that is all too familiar.

G. S. Bhaskar, an acclaimed Kannada cinematographer and someone whom Sumanth had gotten to know at Suchitra Film Society, saw I Shot Myself and offered public praise for it. For the industrial engineering and management graduate Sumanth, for the software engineer Sumanth, to be appreciated among an audience of cinephiles and film school graduates was a shot in the arm.

I Shot Myself whetted Sumanth’s appetite.

For years, Sumanth had been complaining to his father about his heart not being in his job. His father would listen to him and sometimes ask: What will you do once you quit? Sumanth had not found a convincing answer to that question.

In October of 2008, Sumanth arrived in Jersey City in the US for a forty-five-day work assignment with an option to extend. A comfortable suburban life in Jersey city brought with it the whiff of a gateway drug for convenience and comfort. He could get hooked to this, just like scores of others before him. Within weeks, Sumanth began eyeing the stint with suspicion. By the end of the month, he requested a return to Bangalore, making up vague family commitments as an excuse.

Back home, Sumanth poured out familiar frustrations to his father. He told his father he wanted to quit. His old man had no questions for him. The next morning Sumanth put in his papers. It occurred to him that he should learn something that would complement his training in filmmaking. He joined a graphics designing course, believing it would help him design film posters. Over the next six months, a series of events set the path for his life.

Sumanth’s quitting was the final nudge for Shishir, who quit his job and enrolled into a video editing course.

Sumanth and Shishir decided to team up and set up Vyaapya, a multimedia firm, as a means to pay the bills while they made their foray into films. In April of 2009, Vyaapya was registered as a business. In witness for the partnership deed between Sumanth and Shishir as co-founders was Rakshit.

Within months of running Vyapyaa from Bangalore, the new entrepreneurs decided to move base to Udupi and continue making short films.

For as long as Sumanth and Shishir kept a place in Bangalore, Rakshit would drop by for the odd meal and credit. Among friends who were kindred spirits, he would bare his heart about his struggles to bag a role, and in the same breath, announce his dream of starting a collective to help those like them who wanted to make meaningful cinema. Though they shared a love for cinema, only Rakshit had gone for broke.

January 2023

Since Sumanth’s win at NFDC, a sense of expectancy has been building up among family and friends. They’re drawn to him like village folk to the local doctor. But instead of pouring their problems out, the flockers want a taste of his life. They ask him questions, their curiosity sparked by whatever they understand about film festivals over the years. In answering their queries, Sumanth catches their virus of anticipation. He finds himself hooked on the preoccupation of “what’s going to happen next?” the same way the people around him are.

When 2023 rolls around and it is time for the lineup for the Berlin Film Festival, the event that kicks off the global festival calendar, to be decided, Sumanth is hopeful. Marco Mueller, a German legend and an influential voice, had praised Mithya.

A no is what Sumanth finds in his inbox, and he finds it couched in, what he thinks, German politesse, trailing off with a “Let it not dishearten you…” as if those words are all that he needs to alchemize his disappointment into something palatable.

The NFDC win has brought with it a submission fee waiver for Mithya at the biggest film festivals, and Sumanth has used the opportunity to submit Mithya to multiple events at each of the biggest festivals—called sidebars—to improve the chances of a yes. Sumanth quickly puts Berlin’s rejection behind him.

Next up is Cannes, the grandest of destinations for any film, let alone for a debut feature like Mithya. In parallel to the main competition for the prestigious Palme d’Or are the sidebars Un Certain Regard and Directors’ Fortnight. He tries all three. No, no, and no—three rejection emails, one for each festival section he has applied to, show up in his inbox not all at once but one after the other on separate days, without warning or a sense of occasion. The experience is new, the feelings it evokes are new. The only vestige that’s the same is the sign-off in the rejection emails: “Let it not dishearten you…”

Deepti D’Cunha, the NFDC programmer and one of few people Sumanth knows well enough to write to about his woes, chimes back on email: “Be patient.”

2009–2013

Over days and weeks, you shape your work. That’s what Sumanth and Shishir did at the end of 2008 when they quit their jobs and steady paychecks. They learned graphic designing and video editing. They founded a multimedia company to put those skills to work while having more control over their time to make films. They moved back to Udupi to be home and cut down living expenses.

Over years, your work shapes you. That’s what happened to Sumanth and Shishir once they moved to Udupi. They pitched to clients, hired talent, delivered projects, grew accounts, and managed payroll. They got busy building Vyaapya. On the heels of it, they started Fat Fish, a merchandising business catering to the student population in neighboring Manipal’s engineering and medical colleges.

There was no one to tell Sumanth and Shishir how to spend their time. But every time they won an account or saw a happy client, they got swallowed in. They had all the time to pour into making films if they wanted to. But without a stone in their shoe, they missed the fire to fight and to summon their resourcefulness. The point of everything changed, and neither noticed.

Tuglak, Rakshit’s first film as a solo lead, brought him critical acclaim but bombed at the box office. Shortly after, in 2013, Simple Agi Ondh Love Story released in theaters. It proved to be Rakshit’s big break, earning him the moniker of a “Simple Star.” Later that year, Rakshit came to Udupi in a brand new Audi Q5 and took Sumanth and Shishir for a spin in it. He was in pre-production for Ulidavaru Kandanthe, his debut as a screenwriter and director. Rakshit insisted that his two old friends join the cast for script readings. He valued their feedback, much like old times. Sumanth went to a reading but that only made him more aware of his outsider status. If he was looking for that old rush from the days of Suchitra Film Society, from those weekends of shooting with just a handycam and endless gusto, he didn’t find it. In its place, a mild anxiety, a feeling that he didn’t belong.

For forty days, the unit shot in and around Udupi. Rakshit threw them an open invitation to come to set but not for a single day did Sumanth drop by. Months later, when the trailer of the movie dropped to much hubbub, Sumanth watched it like the rest of the world.

Sumanth didn’t rue his luck. There was no time to. By the end of 2013, Sumanth was married, as was Shishir, and soon after the turn of the year, their wives had joined them at Vyaapya and Fat Fish. In two years, Sumanth’s wife was carrying their first child.

In early 2014, Ulidavaru Kandanthe released to commercial success. The movie was praised for its stylized neo-noir feel and its convincing portrayal of the local milieu. In months, it had built a cult following for itself and its star Rakshit.

If during these years, someone unknown to Sumanth had had the occasion to watch him, they would not have been terribly remiss in their appraisal of Sumanth as a singularly focused owner of a small business and a doting husband.

May 2023

There’s something off balance about Sumanth’s situation, like a tennis player who has just lobbed the ball up in the air to serve. But instead of following through and striking the ball, he misses the moment and watches the ball fall softly at his feet. He steps back into what he knows. He starts writing his next script—an abstract story about a man who wants to fly.

At the start of the monsoons, in late May, he receives an invitation from Shanghai. The Shanghai International Film Festival is big but the festival is returning that year to participants and the public after a pandemic-enforced two-year sabbatical and no one Sumanth speaks to is sure of its appeal. Besides, the advice he continues to get from a handful of filmmakers he knows who have previously done the festival circuit, and from programmers who have experience curating festival line-ups, triangulates: “Mithya has the quality to make it to the top festivals; don’t sell yourself short.”

August holds promise. It brings some of the year’s best independent films to Locarno in Switzerland. Mithya is not one of them. Next up, to round off the European summer, is Venice. Another no. His target list is whittling down fast. The confidence that he had wrapped himself up with after NFDC Film Bazaar is worse for wear. Friends and family continue to be curious. Only their curiosity feels more and more like intrusion. He is at a loss for words.

Sumanth is looking uphill at the remaining months of the year. If he gets a selection, he no longer has to trudge through. Doors will open for him. If the stream of rejections continues, the climb gets steeper and the prize at the end of it diminishes. With the year ending so will his window for making it to the lineups of any of the festivals he has submitted to. The rules make it clear that he cannot apply to those festivals again. That, at the moment of thinking it, knots his stomach.

Sumanth’s unable to pour himself into the writing process. Thirty-nine years old already and more aware of the hourglass of his life, he feels weighed down like the man he’s trying to write about.

Busan says no too.

For any successful film festival, finding films is the point. Finding filmmakers is the point. Finding producers willing to fund your film is the point. The point—whether you’re a festival artistic director, a festival programmer, a festival agent, a producer, or a first-time filmmaker who’s left a steady job and poured years of savings into a pipe dream—is to find, and finding takes work. It takes your best social self.

In such a world where you don’t exist until you’re discovered, Sumanth is an anachronism.

Across those four glorious days at the NFDC Film Bazaar that culminated in his debut feature film being applauded by mentors and awarded by the jury, Sumanth met with zero festival directors, zero artistic directors, zero programmers, zero festival agents, and zero production houses. He started zero conversations, walked up to zero strangers, and went to pieces at the general thought of seeking out someone, anyone with better means than him to take his art to the world.

Of the paths available to an indie filmmaker like him, Sumanth understands that he doesn’t meet the bar for a theatrical release. His is perhaps too small a movie for the big screen, and too niche for OTT. His hopes, thus, are pinned on the festival circuit. Only, the year is teaching him slowly, painfully, that the festival game is a hard one to win too. There’s much he doesn’t get—the entire commerce side to festival line-ups where, as well-meaning people educate him, his gender, his nationality, and his ethnicity matter. None of those things he has chosen. But, most of all, what eats him is all the waiting, the sitting on his hands, the refreshing of his inbox countless times a day. It reduces him to someone at the effect of opaque forces. He would rather be making something. He misses the aliveness of making art.

2013–2016

Growing up, what young Sumanth had seen was bountiful farmland and a sprawling family house in the middle of that expansiveness. He would see workers come and go with the cycle of the crops they sowed—areca nut, coconut, vanilla, banana, pepper. He had seen his father Devanand turn himself from a reluctant farmer to someone who did whatever the situation demanded. Through his teens, Sumanth’s own scorecard for his father hinged on what privileges of his were granted. And there were not many that memory served him. His father never gave him a reason for the family’s frugality and Sumanth could not reconcile the acreage they were in possession of with their spartan lifestyle.

Sumanth had remained a stranger to the ebb and flow of farm life through his passage into adulthood. It was only once he had returned home after his graduation did he begin to understand that the manner in which his grandfather had divvied up their ancestral property made it more a millstone than a luxury. He was busy fiddling with his new handycam when vanilla prices nosedived from three thousand to three rupees a kilo, ruining an entire crop meant for export and putting in jeopardy the livelihoods of all who worked on the farm. His respect for his father grew, albeit belatedly.

After returning to Udupi for good, Sumanth had moved in with his parents.

When he had returned, at first, he looked at his father’s life with the aloofness of before. His old man would clean the cowshed, collect dung, milk five cows, bathe them, and Sumanth would sit by his side and chat with him. Asked by no one, Sumanth began waking up at dawn and helping out his father. He was a green farm hand; the cows wouldn’t warm up to him. He would leave the cows under-milked, and—he would learn of this later—his father, without saying a word to him, would return in his absence and milk the cows again so that their udders wouldn’t harden. In the evenings, father and son would make a ritual of watching the most awful of Kannada soaps on television. In return, Devanand looked at Sumanth with a touch of pride as his youngest child founded a firm, paid salaries, and turned a profit. The old man could see that Sumanth put his heart into his business and lived off the energy of building one from the ground up. The son illuminated the world for the father, as the father had once done for him.

On the morning of the seventeenth of May, in the summer of 2016, Sumanth woke with a palpable determination. He had decided that the general neglect of his father’s health had reached a tipping point, what with his old man having recently turned sixty-five and having warded off his, Sumath’s, suggestion for any kind of medical check-up for the last couple of years by counter-suggesting that his wife, Sumanth’s mother, should also be roped in. Sumanth knew that convincing his mother to see the inside of any medical institution was like teaching a stone to talk. He had to split up his parents, and he had to start with his dad, the older of the two.

That morning, as everyday, Sumanth did yoga with his father. but instead of having breakfast with father, he took him to Kasturba Medical College in nearby Manipal for a full body check-up. The bloodwork arrived in the evening: all clear. That same evening Sumanth happened to meet a friend who was an Ayurvedic physician. He showed the reports, which he had on his person, to his friend. One of the parameters for liver function was abnormally high, a marker common but not exclusive to cancer patients, his friend pointed out. At half past seven, after performing a physical examination of his father, his friend recommended an abdominal ultrasound.

They found an eleven-centimeter tumor in the liver. Biopsy confirmed the worst. Because of the size and the location of the tumor, it was inoperable. Because of the formation of thrombus, typical of advanced-stage liver cancer, it was too late for chemo. There’s nothing we can do, the oncologists at Kasturba Medical College declared. They gave his father two months.

Sumanth and his brother Seetharam, who returned home from Bangalore, consulted a homeopathic physician in Kerala who treated cancer patients whom allopathy had given up on. The homeopath had particular experience with later stage cancer and showed promising before and after scans of his past patients, which made the brothers hopeful of a turnaround.

The brothers drove to the forests of Thirthalli to a nature healer, where they spent the better part of the day as the healer went into the forest to pick out a handful of herbs and barks for a decoction for their father.

On someone’s suggestion, they procured Lakshman phal (soursop), helpful in reducing tumor size, in copious quantities.

When Sumanth and his brother were not making sure their father had cocktails of allopathic, homeopathic, and herbal drugs throughout the day, they were sourcing organic coffee for coffee enema to flush out toxins from the cancerous liver. Or buying a Hurom cold press juicer, which their father would have been aghast at, to retain enzymes in the juice.

His wife Shubha was in the final months of her first pregnancy. Sumanth sent her to her parents’ home for the last month of her term. When his brother had to put in some hours at work, he stepped in. Sumanth spent all his waking hours with his father or thinking of him, to the neglect of everything else.

They were due on a bunch of deliverables on a big project for Vyaapya. The work needed Sumanth but he could not bring himself to it. Devanand confided to the oncologist that seeing his son at his beck and call at all times set him on edge. Sumanth started going to the office for a couple of hours in the day, if only to have the chance to scream out loud in the car out of everyone’s sight.

A cousin, who was a practicing cardiologist in the UK and visiting Mangalore around that time, served a dire warning. “Your father’s legs will swell, he’ll scream in pain,” he said. “It’s better that you make arrangements.” The brothers took turns to give hour-long oil massages to their father first thing in the morning. No more cowshed, no more plucking flowers, no more supervising the plantation.

At night, Sumanth would put his father to sleep, reading to him cancer survivor stories. Sometimes, the old man would gently move his son’s hand up from his belly to his chest. Upon being hugged, Devanand would flinch. These occasions apart, his father seemed to escape the debilitating pain that the doctors had warned them about. Meanwhile, on the plantation, wilt wiped off the entire harvest of pepper. The relaying of the asbestos sheet that his father had undertaken before the cancer verdict seemed to drag on without oversight. Sumanth barely noticed.

In the beginning of July, his father managed to hold on to his weight for a couple of weeks. Soon after, he started putting some on. He began asking for hugs again. He let Sumanth place a hand on his belly. Encouraged, he even asked his son to press against it.

By the end of July, his father was hiccuping endlessly. Sodium had left his body.

On the third of August, Shubha was due for her last scan. Sumanth left home for his in-laws’ place around five in the evening. On the way, he got a call from his brother. Their dad had collapsed. They had called for an ambulance to take him to the hospital, his brother said. Should he leave to be with their father? His brother advised against; their father was conscious.

As Sumanth pulled into Shubha’s house, he had a choice to make. He had not told Shubha about his father’s sudden decline. He didn’t want her to worry but for how long could he hold off? An ambulance screamed by. The hospital they were taking his father to was only a couple of minutes away. He knew it was his father in it. He took Shubha for the scan, then in a quick minute out of his wife’s earshot asked the gynecologist if it was safe to tell his wife.

The next day he took Shubha to the hospital to see his father. Sometime later that night, his father turned delirious. So hard he writhed that his limbs had to be tied to the bedpost. On the morning of the fifth of August, 2016, Devanand breathed his last.

When Sumanth returned home from the hospital after the birth of his daughter two days after his father’s last rites, he was at once fatherless and a father.

September 2023

Three-fourths into his story about the man who wants to fly, Sumanth chucks it into the dustbin. It would’ve broken him earlier to be this wasteful, but something inside him has shifted. He doesn’t want to make mistakes. He doesn’t want to learn from his own mistakes. It is too expensive. He would much prefer to learn from others’ mistakes.

He made Mithya to prove to himself that he could make a movie. Now he has no interest in the same outcome. He wants more.

He goads himself to be ruthless. From under the surface of this life, soon enough, the seed of a new idea sprouts. At first, he considers a story that explores the darkness in kids. But then he catches himself. Who will watch a movie starring kids? Whom can he cast who will help him sell the movie? From his previous work, he has learned that his creative choices could be better optimized for the viewer. He digs those lessons up from memory. He reshapes the idea—casting the parents of the kids as the protagonists. He could have a known cast that would give people a reason to come for the film. Why should something that is interesting to me be interesting to others unless I make it so for them, he asks himself. It’s not pandering; I’m exploring my ideas, just in a way that is more palatable, he reassures himself.

On September 15 arrives an email in his inbox. The correspondence is marked “Confidential.” It is from Anupama Chopra, noted film critic and the festival director of the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. The email refers to him as a new cinematic voice and ends with an overture: “We hope you accept our invitation and we await your positive response.”

Across a dozen points scattered across the day, he returns to the email. He wants to be sure. “After all the rejection emails,” he writes to Deepti D’Cunha, “now I know what a selection email reads like.”

2017–2018

Kirik Party released in theaters on the thirtieth of December in 2016. It starred Rakshit Shetty who also co-wrote the script and financed the movie under Paramvah Studios, a production house he had started the previous year. It cost about four crores in Indian rupees. By its opening weekend, the film had made six crores. By the close of the first week, the collections had swollen to ten crores. It ended up making over thirty-five crores, becoming one of the biggest grossing Kannada films of all time.

When Sumanth received a text from Rakshit inviting him to make short films under the Paramvah banner, sometime in early 2017, he was slipping away. Since his father’s passing, a lid had closed on the source of his energy. He was living through a total eclipse. On the surface, he would go through the motions. Under it, his demons had pulled him so far away he was a stranger to his old self. He was a shell at home, he was lost at work. Only playing with his infant daughter brought him back, if fleetingly.

The invitation from Rakshit to him came unannounced but it could not have arrived a moment sooner. Sumanth grabbed on to it with the single-mindedness of someone drowning. Over seventeen drafts and the next several months, he threw himself into writing a screenplay, which he developed from an idea for a story he had carried with him for years. As he committed himself to the process, he felt a climber on a bare rock face. It made him realize how badly he had missed, and how much he wanted, this aliveness inside him.

He sent an early draft of the screenplay to veteran cinematographer G. S. Bhaskar who liked it enough—“You have the eye of a director”—to work with him. G. S. Bhaskar coming on for a short film raised the profile of the project. Sumanth then tracked down Nithin Lukose, sound designer for Thithi which had won at the Locarno Film Festival in 2015. Lukose came on board, as did Midhun Mukundan, who had already made a name for himself through his work in the Kannada film industry.

By the end of pre-production, he had assembled a crack team of technicians.

On the morning of the first day on set, at nine, the unit was ready. There was Bhaskar, with a brand new Arri, the high end of analog film cameras that Paramvah had purchased. There was sound, there was art, there was make-up, there was lights. All waiting for his word. Sumanth took the director’s chair and seated himself in front of the monitor. Seconds passed. Nothing. After several furtive criss-crossing glances, Bhaskar, the seniormost on set, came down and put a hand on his shoulder. Sumanth had missed giving his calls. He didn’t know. At that moment, in front of a unit of thirty who called him sir and took his word as their edict, he learned to say “roll sound, roll camera… action!”

Through that first day, he kept checking in with Shishir, whom he leaned on on set as a sounding board. Shishir kept assuring him that things were alright.

By the end of the four days of shoot, Sumanth had called action numerous times; worked with a crew of professionals for the first time; and made the painful decision to let go of half a day’s shoot because of bad weather in a way that he knew would blight the experience of the opening minutes of his film.

The next August, at the 2018 Bangalore International Short Film Festival, Sumanth’s Neralu, an eighteen-minute story of a young man’s fascination with a fading film star and his creeping obsession to own something of his idol, won the Kannada Competition section.

October 2023

Sumanth has the company of Jaishankar, director of Shivamma, a movie in competition with Mithya at MAMI. “Any film, however bad,” declares Jaishankar, sensing Sumanth’s nervousness, “gets a housefull at MAMI.” He says housefull to mean a full house. He says it to placate Sumanth.

At the festival red carpet, Sumanth freezes, seeing the swarm of paparazzi. He slinks behind the standees and emerges on the other side, only to be forced to actually walk it. For those seconds, he is sure every step he takes is his absolute last. The next morning Sumanth catches a directors-only screening of The Dreamer, a French film he thinks is exquisitely made. He leaves the theater on pins and needles, wondering if his movie is any good. The effects of Jaishankar’s pep talk, however well-intentioned, are short-lived.

Shivamma’s screening is later that evening. There are a few dozen inside the theater by the time the show starts. The number doesn’t swell much—not enough for the theater to even be called half full. To rub salt into Jaishankar’s injury, a technical snafu means the theater is soundless for a few minutes midway through the screening. Sumanth’s anxiety has now calcified into dread. He cannot hold the thought of Mithya’s first screening the next day.

The next day, Mithya gathers an entourage. The cast is here. Members of the crew are here. Sucharita Tyagi, a prominent film critic, has agreed to introduce the film and do the Q&A after the screening. After Jaishankar’s troubles with sound the previous evening, Sumanth has made sure to do a thorough technical check at three in the morning—the only slot he could get from the organizers. Seeing glimpses of the film, his film, on the big screen for the first time, as he checked the sound, the aspect ratio, and other specifics, he felt something inside. Only remnants of that excitement remain at the moment. His mood ebbs and flows with the crowd outside. At five, a couple of hours before the seven o’clock screening, there’s a swell outside. He soon realizes that those feet are not for Mithya. He can only see the familiar faces of his cast and crew who are abuzz about opening night. Half an hour before the curtains go up, he counts to fifty in the queue. Fifteen minutes later, Rakshit Shetty, Kannada film star and a promoter of Paramvah, the studio that has financed Mithya, shows up to a hubbub. Festival goers wake up to a celebrity’s presence. Sumanth introduces his cast and crew to Rakshit.

When he’s done with the formalities and looks around, he can see no one. The queue of pass holders and general audience for the movie has vanished. People have taken their place in. His stomach is in knots, his legs feel heavy. He wants to disappear when he hears his name called in by Sucharita, the host. After a slow minute, he’s inside and the lights go off and he has to make his way up to the VIP section. Sitting there and surveying the theater, he doesn’t want to see what he sees. It’s not housefull. More like handful.

2018–2019

His father’s passing had come at the end of a period in his life when the chasm between how he felt inside and what he showed outside had grown wider than he could ever remember. Without his old man, Sumanth would replay in his head all the petty jibes he had ever made to his old man. Chewing the cud of these memories filled him with regret that fed on itself.

He did not believe he had it in him to be there for his wife and infant daughter. After the delivery, he asked Shubha to stay at her maternal place. For weeks on end, he would roll up the windows in his car and drive around. His thoughts, much like his driving, would circle the same forlorn landscape over and over again.

When the chance arrived to work on a short film, he put his heart into it. The decision did not fix his brokenness but it returned him to a surer footing on the balance beam he was teetering on the edge of. Sumanth embraced all missteps en route to getting Neralu made. Wherever someone else would’ve been bruised, Sumanth took it as humility training. He wanted to learn. But filmmaking is expensive—he couldn’t learn if no one bet on him. Yet, he couldn’t wait for anyone to take a punt on him. So he did it himself.

By late 2018, Sumanth had decided he was going to make another short film. He saw how the look and feel of Neralu transformed under G. S. Bhaskar’s eye, and how Nithin Lukose’s sound design elevated the narrative. He wanted that kind of pedigree but he knew all too well that that level of talent announced itself on the budget sheet. The facts forced Sumanth into a choice. He pulled from his savings, raised money from friends and family. It wasn’t nearly enough but it was a start. He needed a crew for his next short.

Through a common connect, Sumanth found Sandeep who was the cinematographer for one of the short films in competition against Neralu at the Bangalore International Short Film Festival, and the founder of Journeyman Productions, a small production house that was doing corporate branding videos and film appreciation workshops at the time. Sandeep asked Sumanth for the script and, upon reading it, offered not just to work on it with his team but also to partially finance it.

Unlike Neralu where the story unfolded in one house, Neera Melina Gulle needed more than one location and a bigger cast. Their bootstrapping meant the crew had modest equipment. To aggravate matters, the shoot ran up against peak Udupi monsoons in 2019. The odds were stacked against but what had changed this time round was Sumanth. He had learned from the Neralu experience to not be overawed. He showed a surer hand. Proof of his development came by way of recognition from esteemed quarters. Filmmakers like Umesh Kulkarni, a National Film Award winner, spoke highly of the final cut.

Neera Melina Gulle showed Sumanth that he had a voice that came from a lack of formal training in film structure and technique. Even though the final edit was too long to qualify for the short film category at festivals, the experience had persuaded Sumanth.

By late 2019, Sumanth had made up his mind that he would make films for a living. He was aware of the matters that needed settling first, not least of which was the conversation with Shishir who until then had stepped up to support him in the running of Vyaapya and Fat Fish first through his father’s illness and later when he made Neralu.

Around the end of October, over a cup of evening chai, he spoke to Shishir. Rakshit’s earlier invitation to make short films extended to Shishir. While Sumanth had jumped at the chance, Shishir had bid his time. Now Shishir wanted to take the plunge too. By the weekend, the two were in Bangalore talking to Rakshit, telling him how keenly they wanted to make films and seeing a cloud lift when Rakshit offered them a salary as writers for his production house Paramvah Studios. Up until that point, neither had made a dime from films; Sumanth had put a portion of his savings on the line for Neera Melina Gulle. The prospect of getting paid to do what they loved and wanted to devote themselves to felt like a gift—one both accepted without hesitation.

In the subsequent months Sumanth and Shishir ended a shared chapter. They wound up Vyaapya. Fat Fish required much less day-to-day oversight, so they kept the lights on. Shishir started writing his first feature film, while Sumanth and Sandeep, energized by their experience of working together, went in for more. Sandeep suggested they make a web series—stories from the Karavali belt, the western coast of Karnataka—where the place was the motif. Sumanth already had two films—Neralu and Neera Melina Gulle. They planned to make six more. Together, they would sell a bundle of eight short films to OTT. Despite his reservations, Sumanth saw that in Sandeep he had found a perfect foil for the project. Sumanth’s tendency to focus on all the ways things could go belly up was balanced by Sandeep’s buoyancy.

They called the collection Karavali Stories, with Sumanth as a showrunner, and pitched it to Rakshit. Soon, Paramvah came on board and the world was hit by a pandemic.

October 2023

When in Audi 2 at the INOX in Inorbit Mall, Sumanth sees his film on the big screen in a roomful of strangers for the first time, he doesn’t know what to make of the snickers in the audience at odd points in the movie. These are reactions he didn’t plan for, and he wonders what could be funny. He notices, though, that when someone in the audience titters, another follows suit, and then another. There’s a contagion at work that he doesn’t understand.

As his nerves settle, the heads that he had feared had left the auditorium re-appear. There’s a reason for their disappearance, he discovers: they had sunk into the plush seats. And now, as the tension on screen mounts, those same heads re-appear, their backs straighten, their bums shift in the seats. There’s a current in the air. Sumanth can almost touch it. It makes him giddy.

Because it takes him so long to return from the electricity in his experience of movie watching as a communal adventure, he is deaf to the uproarious cheers when the end credits start to roll. The host Sucharita breathes a long ‘Wow!’ into the mike, offering no more words to capture the mood inside the theater. He remembers Aatish, the child actor and star of the movie, who has been waiting outside because of festival age rules. He asks for someone to bring the child in to see the audience’s reaction for himself. People stay back for the Q&A. They come forward rheumy-eyed to shake his hand, to talk about Mithya, his Mithya, as if it picked a strand in the tapestry of their own lives. And as the evening winds down, he sees that there were more than a handful in the audience. Not housefull but not a handful either. Almost full.

2020–2022

Although the limbo of lockdown had a stimulating effect on Sumanth—he completed three screenplays for the Karavali collection in a matter of months despite writing not being his strongest suit—it slowed down work on the overall project. Sandeep and the Journeyman team could not move to Udupi to start assembling the cast and crew for the web series. With the place being the motif they had to assemble a cast that was a fit for the milieu. The pandemic had meant OTT platforms were now awash with films made for theater-going audiences. Rakshit balked, citing that the commercial prospects for a niche web series like theirs had taken a beating. Paramvah pulled out of the financing deal.

Paramvah’s backing out worried Sumanth but Sandeep’s approach to problems was to solve them. By July, Sandeep started sounding out family, friends, and acquaintances with the intention of raising funds for Karavali Stories. They renamed it Ekam, conceptualizing it as the first of several series centered on different cultural belts in India.

Swept by the chutzpah of Sandeep and the Journeyman team, Sumanth went to the mat with big problems that otherwise would have had him shaking his head. Money started coming in, casting calls started going out, directors began walking in through the doors of the apartment in Udupi they rented as an office.

As the showrunner, Sumanth was involved in the minutiae of putting together a project on a scale much bigger than he had ever worked on. He brainstormed the packaging of the series. He worked on the theme music. He directed a video casting call for new faces. Gradually, the pieces began to fall into place. The team planned the shoots one after the other with short breaks in between.

In the January of 2021, Sumanth wielded a megaphone and manned his biggest shoot to date for Masquerade, one of his shorts in the series. In the lead was Raj B. Shetty, whose gangster drama Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana had a devout following. A couple of weeks later, Sumanth was directing Void in the heart of the wilderness in western Karnataka. Right after, he was helping other directors in the Ekam ensemble on their shoots. By April, they had locked a total of seven edits, including Sumanth’s previous two—Neralu (renamed Legacy) and Neera Melina Gulle (renamed Delusions).

Their planned series of eight thematically tied shorts, Ekam, was missing just one when the country went into lockdown again. Through the summer, the team disbanded but post-production work moved the project closer to completion. By the time the rains had died down, the Journeyman team were talking with Netflix, Hotstar, and SonyLiv. The execs showed polite enthusiasm without ever asking for a minute’s footage. It became clear, much like Rakshit had suggested the previous year, that the OTT landscape had shifted. Films were no longer releasing in theaters. They were dropping on the small screen. OTT platforms had access to a growing content queue. Journeyman and Sumanth were no longer on the same playing field that they had hoped to stand out in. The game was different; the stakes were higher.

All doors shut by November.

Sandeep had sold Ekam hard to anyone in his orbit. Whether it was hosting a residential meet-up to build a collective of indie filmmakers and actors and technicians, or going the whole nine yards with a show bible and a pitch deck for Ekam’s investors, Sandeep always believed he had the wind at his back. But when he found OTT execs giving him the runaround and investors growing impatient, he could not but cling on to hope tighter.

For Sumanth, it was different. Ekam was film school. When it didn’t find takers, he checked out. When his father had died, he had lost the track of his life. Where life then had felt narrow, constricted, it had since opened up into possibilities he had never imagined. He had been back from hell. That he got to do what he loved felt like a gift.

After Ekam was put on ice, Sumanth returned to an idea that had been marinating in his head. He began working on his next venture, his first feature film. In a later interview, dated October 2023, to Deccan Herald, after the selection of the said film in the Best South Asian Film category at MAMI, Sumanth would point to it:

During the Covid-19 pandemic, one of my relatives passed away. A week after that, his wife died by suicide. At the funeral, I couldn’t help but look at their two small children — one, an 11-year-old and the other much younger. The younger child was not aware of what was happening. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and wanted to understand situations like this better. At what point does a child grieve? How did they feel and what did they have to deal with, especially mentally? These questions remained in my mind and I soon found myself writing about it.

By February of 2022, Sumanth had his feature-length screenplay ready. It had an eighteen-day shoot, eleven days in summer and seven in the monsoons. Paramvah produced it. It was called Mithya.

October 2023

Unknown to him, word gets around. As one of fourteen movies from across South Asia to have been selected for the main competition section, Mithya has earned five screenings. By the second screening, the auditorium fills out. There’s a different kind of contagion, the kind where the energy of the audience swells together in a wave and crests at the climax. He receives a stirring ovation at the close of the second screening.

This time his doubt has turned a corner. With the audience, as part of it, he feels the full energy of the collective experience. It is the very thing he has heard about from others in their falling-in-love stories with cinema. Only this time it is his movie that the audience seems to connect with. There are murmurs at the festival: “Have you seen Mithya?” Growing clusters of people hang back after the screenings to meet him, to shake his hand.

An hour before the third screening, a young man, a budding filmmaker, seeks Sumanth out. He’s a decade younger, carries a festival tote on his shoulder.

“Why is there no trailer for your film?” he asks. “I checked YouTube and the MAMI site.”

Sumanth shares that a child is the film’s lead and he didn’t want the audience to think it was a children’s film and stay away from it.

“How will people know about the film then?” he asks.

The youth says he’s looking forward to watching the film after having read the blurb on the festival catalog. He has a short film being shown at the festival. The two continue to chat as Sumanth sees people queue up for the screening.

After the screening Sumanth combs the crowd but cannot find his young interlocutor.

The next morning at NMACC, the festival’s main venue, Sumanth finds the young man hanging about as he’s giving an interview to the media. The youth’s in a blue checked shirt and denims. They’re in the filmmaker’s lobby.

The youth waits until Sumanth is done and then asks if they could have a coffee.

They sit around one of the round tables set up for filmmakers. Sumanth asks for a chai. As he’s about to sip from his cup, the young man starts to speak.

He tells Sumanth that he caught the screening the previous day. He watched it with his girlfriend. The words come out slowly, keyed down. There’s a struggle for each of them. He says as the movie closed his girlfriend got up and walked out from the theater by herself. He tried calling her but she wouldn’t answer. She wouldn’t answer—she switched her phone off—for the rest of the day. Late in the evening she sends him a bunch of videos, one after the other. The videos look the same—of the ceiling fan in her room—but were taken on different days. The time stamps on those videos went way back in years.

He has been seeing this girl for about two years, the young man confesses, and nothing in his summary of that time helps him make sense of the videos coming his way. After a while, his girlfriend calls. She tells him her brother had committed suicide. He hung himself from the fan. She utters the words without forewarning. She says that she saw herself in the eleven-year-old Mithya. The movie, she says, made her feel like her pain had been shared by someone else. It felt to her like closure.

Moments of silence ensue. The man sitting across Sumanth asks if he could give him a hug. They hug. Sumanth mumbles something about not knowing what to say. In that moment, though, he knows. He knows his art is not only his. It cannot be. It is his as much as it is everybody else’s. Or else, what’s the point?

February 2024

At the Bengaluru Film Festival the following February, with his own family in the audience, Sumanth gets a standing ovation.

As he walks down the steps of the auditorium to the podium as the end credits roll, someone catches him on the way and hugs him tight, as a packed theater applauds. Sumanth forgets himself, his bashfulness, and submits.

A lady in her thirties has taken an overnight train from Ballari to catch Mithya at the festival. During the Q&A, she tries speaking up from her seat in the front row. Her words are lost in her sobs. He finds out later: she lost her brother to suicide.

A child psychologist walks up to him to commend him on getting the nuances around the effects of abandonment on a child right.

Festival-goers walk up to him the morning after the screening to confess that they were so awash with emotion after seeing the movie they didn’t have a conversation left in them. So they left and have returned to speak with him. They have just one request, the same: “Please keep making films.”

He promises them he will. He makes another promise, this one to himself. He promises himself to never forget these acts of unreasonable hospitality.

In the months ahead, Mithya will travel to Austin, to New York, to Los Angeles, to Stuttgart, to Melbourne, to a bordertown in Serbia. Like at Austin (the Jury Award), it will win at some of these places.

In the months ahead, Mithya will have a theatrical run in select locations across the country.

At eleven in the morning on July 13, 2024, Ekam will drop online as a ticketed product, unrestrained by gatekeepers and marketed by influencers. Thanks to Sandeep’s doggedness (and despite Sumanth’s grim fears of the platform crashing), they will build a platform to stream the anthology on for anyone in the world to watch for a hundred and forty-nine rupees. The admission fee will include the script bible and the screenplays for all the seven films in the series. Anurag Kashyap will refuse the chance to watch a private cut of Ekam, promising Sumanth instead that he would watch the series like everybody else once it drops.

Sumanth’s work will be seen by audiences speaking tongues different from the Tulu and Kannada spoken by the characters in his films, living lives different from those in Mithya’s Udupi and Ekam’s Karavali. Through the language of cinema he will tell them stories. They will respond to it. And that’s all that he will need.

Sometimes, Sumanth’s father would remove his dentures and perform outrageous contortions of his mouth that would have both adults and children around him in splits. This image comes to Sumanth at odd times. In form his father is unrealised but the old man’s presence lingers in his life’s most purposeful and mundane moments alike.

When his father had passed, Sumanth had spent many months questioning the point of it all. It was the loss of his father that pushed him to truly explore what it means to love and live. That made him open Mithya with this tribute: “This one’s for you, Pappa!” That made it impossible for him to soak in the applause he received at Mithya’s screenings without remembering his old man.

For many years, Sumanth could not make sense of his life. Until he stopped trying to. He has since accepted his life as an invitation to make meaning and to find himself along the way.

Levels of the Game

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