Setting a milestone for Haryanvi-language cinema, Ankur Hooda’s experimental debut feature The Calf Doll has been selected for the 70th BFI London Film Festival, where it will compete for the prestigious Grierson Award. This is the first Haryanvi film to premiere and compete at the marquee UK festival.
Set in a smog-choked village in Haryana, The Calf Doll follows a retired professor whose cow gives birth to a stillborn calf. When his farm hand leaves for a city job, he reluctantly turns to a forbidden rural ritual: crafting a life-like doll from the stillborn’s body in an attempt to trick the cow into lactating. Despite his wife’s warnings, he becomes increasingly consumed by the ritual, as dreams and nightmares begin to blur with reality. Shot in Hooda's ancestral village, the film follows an elderly couple caught between tradition and modernity.
“The Calf Doll was made in my small ancestral village, on a meagre budget, without any institutional backing or resources," the 25-year-old debutant tells THR India. "To learn that our bootstrapped Haryanavi indie has found its way to the prestigious BFI London Film Festival was tough to process. I’m also really happy that, through this little indie film, people in India and beyond are beginning to look towards the fairly under-represented Haryanavi cinema and pay attention to rural stories and voices from my region."
Following a failed attempt to make a feature film the previous year, Hooda abandoned the conventional filmmaking process, working without a script or pre-planned narrative. He and his collaborators improvised with the cast and crew on location, spending time in the village and allowing the story to emerge organically. “We weren’t thinking about whether we were making fiction, documentary or a hybrid, or even whether it would be a short or a feature,” says Hooda, who has also edited and produced the film.
Cinematographer and co-producer Anish Sarai expanded on the visual language of the film. “Working on The Calf Doll changed the way I think about the camera. Instead of using cinematography to explain or underline what the audience should feel, we tried to let the images remain open to observe, to linger and sometimes to simply be present. The film exists in an unusual space between documentary and fiction, and that uncertainty became part of its visual language.” The film was shot on Sarai and filmmaker Achal Mishra’s personal DSLRs, with lenses and sound recorders borrowed from friends.
The Calf Doll previously played at international venues like CPH:DOX, Jeonju IFF and DokuFest. Hooda’s own grandparents play themselves in the film.
The 70th BFI London Film Festival will run from October 7 to October 18. The Grierson Award, the festival's top documentary prize named after Scottish filmmaker John Grierson, was instituted in 1976 and recognises innovative and exciting documentaries from the world.
The Calf Doll will have its premiere at the festival on October 8.