Sadak, Kulfi and Hello Guyzz!: Sampling the Shorts at DIFF 2023

Sadak, Kulfi, and Hello Guyzz!: Perhaps some of the most delightfully sharp young characters in the DIFF program belonged to Daanish Shastri’s short film, Sadak. The film posits its drama, told with a roguish sense of humor, around a strip of connecting concrete road to a Kumaoni village. The road, with its mobility, holds different meanings for different people. Some kids bemoan its construction, which would enable their teachers to arrive on time. For Divya (Nikita Pandey), however, the road would engender access to a school better equipped than their local village one. Her dreams of being an astronaut are laughed off.

The road does get built, but not with the properly commissioned fiscal support, the crafty contractor siphoning off half the money for his own ends and putting it away into furnishing and expanding his own house. Not before long, the road runs into disrepair. But Divya isn’t one to have her spirit easily broken. Along with her friends, she devises plans to set things right by punishing the contractor and dispensing justice to her swindled village folk. There is a cheeky glee that Shastri brings into his compact little film, relying on familiar figures and native beliefs but performing a whole lot of perky, witty play on morality and revenge.

A lightness of touch that makes Sadak so memorable in its scaled-back mischief is utterly absent in Kiran Narayan Dhamale’s Kulfi. Also set in a village and circling a boy, Ganya, and his mother, a wage laborer, somehow scraping through in desperate circumstances, this is about a rare offering of grace. But Dhamale forces on this tale such a trying, exhausting heavy-handedness, inserting dollops of miserablist music atop it, Kulfi quickly becomes indistinguishable in its sombreness. The wretchedness comes off as exploitative, any shred of insight that is empathetically engaged with the lives depicted replaced by a gaze that merely scans and surveys the landscape and what it contains in a strangely disinterested fashion.

Pivoting on the boy’s lingering desire to have the kulfi from the man who comes bearing it trundling through the village, the film is oddly leached of any curiosity in the lives of its characters. Even as the short film is inordinately and inexcusably protracted to almost half an hour, we come away barely knowing anything about this mother and son beyond the angle of deprivation and keeping their wants curbed to sustain themselves. A bunch of repetitive, contrived school scenes dulls the flow further. Overstaying its course, Kulfi doesn’t manage to earn the pathos it aims to gather in its final shot.

A similarly troubled gaze also props up in Samiksha Mathur’s Hello Guyzz!! While this short is relatively more intriguing, the approach flattens the material into a strictly limited exploration of a woman in a constricted household with straitened means who has her shot at escape and joy through channeling her TikTok avatar. Sumita admits her husband didn’t initially take well to this interest of hers but has gradually come around to realizing it holds as much value for her as he himself does. This avatar gives credence and legibility to her identity, which she had imagined would be erased under the burden of raising her three kids.

She confesses she would be paralyzed if this is ever taken away from her. However, the film is ultimately unable to escape the perils of its gaze. It feels cobbled together as a student project, bordering on a case study than a film with any sustained, layered interrogation into its central character and what her parallel identity, situated at a complex intersection, implies. Bland and superficially invested, the film is a disservice to its lead, so when Sumita achieves her milestone of a certain follower count, her exalted joy doesn’t transmit through. 

A selection of films, including these shorts, is available at the virtual edition of DIFF 2023, playing till 15 November.