Two Indian films from the Vision section of the 31st Busan International Film Festival have won awards. Shashank Walia’s Birds in the Dark received the Songwon Vision Audience Award – Asia, and Sailesh Rathnakumar’s Selvi, starring Anjali Patil, won the Hylife Vision Award and the Taipei Film Commission Award.
The 31st Busan International Film Festival, which ran from October 6 to 15 in South Korea, saw two Indian films from the Vision section of the festival win big.
Shashank Walia’s Punjabi language feature, Birds in the Dark, received the Songwon Vision Audience Award – Asia, which comes with a cash prize of 10 million Korean Won. Selvi, Tamil director Sailesh Rathnakumar's first feature film, starring Anjali Patil, picked up the Hylife Vision Award and the Taipei Film Commission Award. Both were among the only two Indian titles in the Vision-Asia section, a showcase of fresh work from the Asian cinema space.
Birds in the Dark had its world premiere at the festival. Written, shot and directed by Walia, the black-and-white film unfolds in rural Punjab during the farmers’ uprising. The story follows an officer worn down by the job and a man held under suspicion, whose encounter slowly turns into an unexpected bond of tenderness and understanding. Birds in the Dark moves between dialects of Punjabi, Kashmiri and Urdu.
Mauli Singh, Sapna Das, Harwinder Aujla, Shahnawaz Bhat and Navdeep Bajwa lead the cast. Reema Kaur, Hansal Mehta and Sahil Saigal have jointly produced the project under the True Story Films banner.
Commenting on the film's win at the festival, Walia said, "I am deeply grateful that Birds in the Dark has won the Audience Award at Busan. We have always thought of this as a people's film, and this recognition belongs, above all, to the people of the five villages in Punjab who came together to make it. We owe the film to them. This award is theirs.”
Producer Hansal Mehta spoke about the film's win, the love it received from the Busan audience, and what it all means to him, "Sahil (Saigal) and I are proud that Birds in the Dark has won the Songwon Vision Audience Award, and prouder still of the love it has received from Korean audiences. When an audience embraces a fresh voice, chooses subtlety over spectacle, and responds to a film about gender, labour, justice, love and resistance, you realise that as long as cinema like this lives on, there is hope in our world. This award fills me with that hope."
Selvi stars Anjali Patil in the titular role, as a migrant homecare nurse. Patil has also produced the film through her banner, Anahat Films, with the Red Sea Fund among the co-producers. Selvi follows a home care nurse who takes on her best friend's shift after the friend collapses. Over 24, then 48 hours, the film slowly unravels the world around Selvi, bringing to light the migration, exhaustion, invisible labour, and sacrifices of those who move from smaller cities to larger ones in search of a better life.
The film, which premiered in the Vision–Asia section, won the Hylife Vision Award as well as the Taipei Film Commission Award. Selvi had its world premiere on October 9, where it opened to a full house. Subsequent screenings of the film throughout the festival also saw full audiences.
In an earlier exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, the film's lead actor and producer Anjali Patil addressed the conversations she hoped it would spark among international audiences and how the film is not only an Indian story but is relevant across the world.
"The first conversation I really hope it creates internationally is on the space for contemporary Indian stories—nothing which comes with the tag of something "exotic" or catered for the Western eye. Home care, nursing and healthcare professionals and their exhaustion is relevant all across the world; it's not just an Indian story. It's a most relevant topic. If we could tap into the conversation of the invisibility of healthcare professionals, that would be fantastic."
The film is headed next to the 50th Sao Paulo International Film Festival.