Impromptu short-film grabs attention

The 15-minute film made by debutant director and writer Syed Amaan Ahmed, bagged The Best Original Screenplay and Experimental Short Film award at Paris and Singapore, respectively.

Hyderabad: A debutant short-film maker from the city created ripples at Paris Cinema Awards (PCA), France and World Film Carnival, Singapore (WFCS), with his independent film ‘Carnitapu’.

The 15-minute film made by debutant director and writer Syed Amaan Ahmed, bagged The Best Original Screenplay and Experimental Short Film award at Paris and Singapore, respectively. While the WFCS award came earlier this week, Amaan received the PCA award on Wednesday.

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What does an artist feel when their work is judged or rejected or validated? What makes the consistently create new works even when they don’t get any validation? These and more about artists’ emotions make up the crux of the short film.

“I always wanted to write and make a film right from childhood. I ended up writing and directing two surrealist plays, Skepticism and Badlav which were received well in the city. Along the journey, one thing that always ran through my mind was how artists are judged in general and used to think of this from an artist’s perspective and I ended up writing the script for ‘Carnitapu’ in 2020,” shares Amaan.

The short film begins with a madman carrying a crumpled pamphlet of an artists’ carnival and delivers it to the protagonist who is an artist. The artist then goes around collecting strange and surreal elements required to create her artwork but the artwork turns out to be just a dot. “It signifies that we are just tiny dots in the big universe. It is a tribute to artists across the world who put their everything into the work they create even if it means losing their sanity,” shares Amaan.

The film was made without a proper script and a lot of improvisation and jugaads went into the making. “It was shot in just two days and everyone is a debutant in the film. Even the name of the film was a word that I coined and it doesn’t mean anything. I was just toying around the word ‘carnival’ as the artists’ carnival in the film is a central plot element and I ended up naming it ‘Carnitapu’,” he explains.

He also finds it ironic that the film which talks about judging artists actually received accolades. “We didn’t want to send it to film festivals but somewhere along the line we wanted the recognition and validation like any other artist. The film was made without a properly written script and a lot of it was just narrated by me to the actors but ironically it won the best original screenplay award in PCA. It was also rejected from many festivals, proving the point of the film,” he shares.

The film has also been selected at Tagore International Film Festival and Port Blair International Film Festival.

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