In this conversation at the 79th Festival de Cannes, Anupama Chopra sits down with director Mehar Malhotra, lead actor Prayrak Mehta, and actor-casting director Nikita Grover — the team behind *Shadows of the Moonless Nights*, one of only two Indian films in official selection this year and chosen from 2,750 entries worldwide for the prestigious La Cinef section. The 24-minute Punjabi-language short, made under FTII's safety net, follows Rajan, a young factory worker trapped in gruelling night shifts and a volatile home life, drifting through sleeplessness in pursuit of a rest that never comes. Mehar shares the disbelieving, surreal story of how she got the call from La Cinef curator Dimitra Karya — convinced at first that the email was spam — and Prayrak recounts learning the news at a backyard brew bar in Versova, walking away from a first meeting to take Mehar's call and never returning. Nikita, who is both the casting director and plays Rajan's sister Anju, remembers being told at a party so casual that she and Naina were too drunk to register the news properly. The team then dives deep into the craft of the film — how Mehar, after years of FTII experiments with female protagonists, deliberately challenged herself to inhabit the psyche of a young Punjabi man as her final project; how Prayrak built Rajan around routine and silence, since the character has almost no lines; how the now-iconic confrontation scene between Rajan and Anju was shot largely on instinct, in a cramped one-take, with a Sony Venice and a DOP working miracles in tight space; and how Mehar and sound designer Sai Sanjay scripted the entire soundscape — including the haunting factory tape sound that lives in Rajan's head — before a single frame was shot, inspired by Lucrecia Martel. Mehar also reveals the deeply personal origin of the film: watching her own maasi work brutal call-centre night shifts when she was a child, returning home hollow-eyed to a one-BHK house too small for sleep. They close with what gives them hope for cinema — that India is a nation of born storytellers, that Cannes is where filmmakers finally feel they belong, and that as long as human civilisation exists, people will always find a way to come together and celebrate the stories that matter most.