Here comes the Sun-dance: Two South India films to premiere in the US

The debutant directors talk about their first steps into filmmaking

With no feature films from India finding a place in Sundance’s official selections,  it seemed like a quiet start to the year. But when the festival announced its short film programme a few days later, South India made a splash.

 

For the first time, two films featuring languages from the region will premiere at America’s largest independent film festival. Anooya Swamy’s Telugu-Kannada bilingual debut Pankaja, and Raman Nimmala’s Telugu-language O’Sey Balamma nudged their way ahead of 11,480 submissions from 164 countries and territories. They will be among 54 shorts selected for screening in Park City, Utah this January. 

Heidi Zwicker, senior programmer for feature films and short films at Sundance, found both films visually dynamic and capable of immersing audiences in their cinematic worlds within their runtimes of less than 15 minutes. 

“(They) were shot in the same country, but feel utterly distinct from one another: In the lives their characters inhabit as well as the style with which these talented directors explore those lives,” she said. The two directors, although trained at film schools in the US, returned to their roots to tell their first stories. 

Missing men 

Pankaja, named after its protagonist, is about a young mother (Harshini Boyalla) who, along with her daughter Lalli (Padmashree G), searches through city slums in hopes of bringing her missing husband home. The film was born from Swamy’s curiosity about early motherhood and how a child’s life is shaped by the absence of a father. Fragments of her own childhood inform the story — Swamy’s mother had her when she was 16. She watched her struggle to find belonging, as a Telugu-speaking person living in Bengaluru, and acceptance as a capable mother.

 

Swamy also witnessed men often engaged in informal or illegal labour. “Many left home for work and rarely returned. This made me question: how do you report a missing person who was doing something illegal?” The dissonance was stark: Official numbers of undocumented workers who go “missing” remain low, but the stories of their wives and children tell another truth. Her script, refined through multiple grants, wonders whether a woman and her daughter can seek answers in systems designed to work against them. 

Whether or not it shakes the system, she hopes the film will lay bare its darkly funny workings. “Those who would like the film are people who are able to see the truth and still live within lies, as many of us do.” Swamy enjoys the idea of “performance, the need to participate in something not based in reality, but elevation.” That is what brought her to filmmaking, and to choreography before that. 

Currently studying for a degree in film and TV production at New York’s Tisch School of the Arts, Swamy describes herself as “a Bengaluru hudugi (girl), through and through”. She shot in real locations in India and cast mainly non-actors after auditions in the communities she wanted to represent. With help from the city’s film industry, she found production resources and much of the crew locally. There were a few exceptions, such as director of photography Luke Kao — but he fit right into the milieu, reportedly demolishing “a plate of biryani in one sitting”. 

Pieces of childhood 

Like Swamy, O’Sey Balamma’s director Nimmala — a film major from the Columbia School of the Arts — felt the pull to process pieces of his childhood. His 13-minute movie is about how a matriarch and her housekeeper confront solitude through the intimacy of each other’s company during Sankranti celebrations. 

“It comes directly from the summers I spent at my grandmother’s home (in India), growing up around her and the house-help, also named Balamma,” said Nimmala, who lives in New Jersey. “I loved their daily bickering and playful exchanges, but I also 

witnessed their quieter moments, the longings for people who were no longer in their lives.” 

Their dynamic was as layered as it was deep. “I started to understand the limits built into their companionship, shaped by their different social and economic positions.” Nimmala had a job in finance in New York when the urge to make films — and this film in particular — took hold. He wrote the script before joining Columbia School of the Arts’ film programme, and developed it there for his first major assignment. 

That script, he said, improved over the course of shooting in Telangana’s busy Neredigunta village. The two lead actors, Mani Amma K L K (Amma Garu) and Dhanalakshmi Mudi Bandla (Balamma), had worked in commercial Telugu cinema and TV serials. 

“They came into our small indie set with a very different sensibility of acting and storytelling,” he recalls. As the two styles interacted, the film naturally acquired a funnier and lighter tone. A parade scene, starring 30 people, live instruments, and an animal, grew more lively and chaotic as people gathered behind the camera to watch. 

Nimmala was raised equally on Chiranjeevi films by his family, and Judge Judy re-runs on American television. Together with 

O’Sey Balamma’s producer, Priyanka Krishnan, he is developing two other feature films exploring similarly personal and distinctive worlds based in South India. Krishnan hopes the Sundance momentum will help their film travel widely. “A big personal goal for us in 2026 is to bring it back to India for a premiere and screen it for local audiences along with the entire cast and crew.” 

India at Sundance over the years 

Diaspora and resident Indian artists have both been growing in presence at Sundance. This year will also see actor Sheeba Chadha travel to the festival with the cast of the episodic series BAIT, the directorial debut of British star Riz Ahmed. Another British star, Charli xcx, who is partly of Indian descent, has two experimental films opening at the event — I Want Your Sex and The Moment. 

Since the late Hollywood actor Robert Redford founded the Sundance Institute 45 years ago, its festivals and labs have gradually come to be viewed as a mecca for independent filmmakers. This will be the festival’s first edition since Redford’s passing last September. Sundance’s interest in international cinema programming rose over the course of the 1990s, John Nein, a senior programmer and director of strategic initiatives, told Business Standard in an interview in 2024. 

Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala and Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist were early entrants. More Indian films began to be submitted in 2005, when the festival launched its world cinema competition. Among them, Sandhya Suri’s I for India, Geetu Mohandas’ Liar’s Dice, Preshant Nair’s Umrika and Q’s Brahman Naman. Documentaries Writing with Fire and All that Breathes, later nominated for Academy Awards, also premiered there. 

With major names in attendance, the festival isn’t as scrappy as it once was. That makes it a costly affair for industry practitioners and fans to attend. A single screening costs $35 to attend; festival packages go for $920. But the institute counts on funds from the big-draw event to keep its other initiatives going. It runs screenwriting labs that benefit filmmakers who operate outside the traditional studio system, pursue bold themes, and experiment with form, funding, and distribution. 

Director Ajitpal Singh was among the grantees of one such lab that Sundance organised in India with a local partner between 2012 and 2015. It was rare to have a lab that was not bureaucratic, he said, and did not involve having to please any government officials to get things done. Singh went on to show another one of his films, Fire in the Mountains, at Sundance in pandemic-marked 2021, the only fully-virtual edition of the festival. Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox was workshopped through the Sundance labs in the US.

 

Last year, self-taught filmmaker Rohan Kanawade received the grand jury prize for world dramatic cinema for his debut Sabar Bonda, a Marathi meditation on queer love. “The film went on to sell theatrically to many territories around the world, including the US, at a time when theatrical distribution for foreign-language independent features is increasingly challenging,” observed programmer Heidi Zweiger. The festival now wants to build appreciation for regional cinemas within India. 

Indian filmmakers are increasingly grappling with real challenges for independent work, especially when it comes to distribution. It is a worldwide problem, as programmer Nein had earlier noted: “I guess part of the definition of independence for me is that it’s undeterred, resilient, bold. It keeps trying to find a way.”