Mumbai: A film made by a student of Films and Television Institute of India (FTII) Pune has done the country proud.
Chidananda Naik’s course-end film ‘Sunflowers were the first ones to know’ bagged the La Cinef Award for Best Short at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
La Cinef consisted of 18 student films, chosen out of 2263 entries by film schools from all over the world.
The student director received the award on Thursday.
The film is based on a popular Kannada folklore of an elderly woman stealing a rooster after which the sun does not rise.
The film is a production of the TV Wing’s one-year programme where four students from different disciplines — Direction, Electronic Cinematography, Editing, Sound — worked together for one project as a year-end coordinated exercise, according to an Ministry of Information & Broadcasting press release.
Director Chidananda worked with Suraj Thakur, who shot the film, Manoj V (editor) and Abhishek Kadam (sound) as part of their final-year coordinated exercise and passed out from FTII in 2023.
This is the first time a film by a student from one-year Television course of FTII has won at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.
