Children are natural mimics, and Dulo, a 10-minute short written and directed by Mehkansh Kathuria and produced by Ajinkya Hukerikar, takes that idea seriously enough to build an entire film around it. The short traces how the youngest members of a society pick up on the hierarchies, aggressions and fear circulating around them, then reenact those patterns through the most unguarded medium available to them: play.
Mehkansh and Ajinkya are quick to point out that the film uses conflict as a backdrop rather than a headline. “War is just a setting in this film,” Ajinkya says. “Violence, power plays and fear are absorbed by children in civilised societies too. We've evolved in our technology and infrastructure, but some of our primal instincts haven't moved very far.” Mehkansh adds that the story was written to resist any single geography: “It could happen anywhere.”
That refusal to localise the film is precisely what makes it land now, with global conversations increasingly circling back to what children absorb from the adults and systems around them. Dulo reads less like a statement on any one conflict and more like a pattern the filmmakers are asking audiences to recognise in themselves.
Constructing a setting specific enough to feel real, yet untethered from any one place on the map, turned into one of the film's harder technical problems. Ajinkya's technical background also informed the production. Beyond producing Dulo, he works as a media technologist across real-time VFX, virtual production and spatial tech, and that perspective shaped how the team approached the film's visual world.
Dulo leans heavily on VFX, while the project itself took five years to assemble the people and resources needed to bring that setting convincingly to screen. Ajinkya's guiding principle stayed simple throughout: “Good VFX is when you don't see it.” The goal wasn't spectacle; it was to make the environment disappear into the story, so nothing pulled an audience out of it.
That same instinct for craftsmanship ran through the rest of the crew. Cinematographer Mihir Fichadiya, editor Adeeth Bhardwaj, and sound designer-composer Krishna Purohit each left their mark on the film's final shape, while executive producers Medha Khanna and Roshil Verma steered the project through its long gestation.
Part of that journey was funded by the public, and Ajinkya sees the film's slow, well-resourced build as evidence against a common assumption in independent film. “Creativity is often linked with struggle and a lack of resources, especially in independent filmmaking,” he says. “We felt the opposite. Give talented people the right tools, time and support, and they can push the work much further.”
With the film finished, Mehkansh and Ajinkya are now looking toward Dulo's life on the festival circuit and hoping it travels beyond the usual programming slots: into the hands of organisations working with children touched by conflict and people with the reach to widen that conversation.
Neither filmmaker frames the film as an answer. They'd rather it function as a question audiences carry out of the room: How early do children absorb the behaviours they see around them, and how much of that do we continue to carry from one generation to the next?
Dr James Garbarino, an American psychologist and author who was a professor at Loyola University Chicago, passed away earlier this year. Dr Garbarino whose research centred on children and violence had watched the finished cut of Dulo and didn't mince words: “I don't often get speechless, but this film leaves you with your mouth open. Visually, it's so clear and powerful... it's pretty much flawless.”
As Dulo heads into its festival run, that's the bet its makers are making: that a short built slowly and deliberately, around a question rather than a conclusion, is the kind that stays with people.