In this conversation at the 79th Festival de Cannes, Anupama Chopra sits down with Anurag Kashyap, who returns not as a director with a film in selection, but as a self-described pilgrim - here only to watch movies, sit through five films a day, and figure out where cinema is heading. Anurag describes this year as a deliberate echo of 2008, when, lost and battered by the cold reception of Black Friday and No Smoking, he came to Cannes to find his bearings as a filmmaker. Almost two decades later, with AI looming over the industry and everyone he loves and admires building toward it, he is travelling the festival circuit again, looking for inspiration and for his own place in what comes next. He talks with infectious excitement about the films that have moved him - Jane Schoenbrun's exhilarating, genre-busting Un Certain Regard opener Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jordan Firstman's audacious queer feature Club Kid, and Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland with Sandra Hüller - and what they reveal about the fearless, politically alive direction cinema is moving in. Anurag also opens up about why he has stepped back from directing for the moment, choosing instead to write commissioned scripts and dialogues for Vikramaditya Motwane, Love Ranjan, Aakib Ali, Nikhil Mahajan and several others - a return, he says, to the learning phase he had in the early 2000s writing for Mani Ratnam, Shankar, Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Ram Gopal Varma. He explains why he chose to stay out of the new Independent Filmmakers Association of India despite supporting its mission, why he would rather create funding pools for emerging filmmakers than dip into one, and shares three concrete pieces of advice for young Indian filmmakers hoping to navigate festivals like Cannes - travel economy, embed in the circuit, attach a sales agent early, and stop assuming the world already knows who you are because you are famous at home.