A still from the film ‘Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know’. (X)
The Kannada short film Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know has qualified for Oscars 2025 in the Live Action Short Film category.
The Ministry of Information & Broadcasting on Monday, 4 November, announced that the film directed by a Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) student Chidananda S Naik has qualified for the Oscars 2025.
Early this year, the film won the first prize of La Cinef at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
Announcing the news on social media platforms, the institution, FTII wrote on Instagram, “Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know, an FTII student film, OFFICIALLY QUALIFIES for the 2025 Oscars in the Live Action Short Film Category!
Congratulations to the entire student team Mr. Chidanand Naik (Direction), Suraj Thakur (Camera), Manoj V (Editing) and Abhishek Kadam (Sound).”
Also Read: Mysuru filmmaker bags Cannes La Cinef first prize
A Kannada folklore
Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know is based on a Kannada folk tale about an old woman who steals a rooster. As a result of her action, the sun stops rising in the village.
Set in a quaint village and based on the popular Banjara folklore of Karnataka from which community Chidananda Naik belongs and grew up, the short takes on an ethereal quality engaging the audience in an enigmatic tour de force and contemplating on the reality or fiction of it all.
One may call Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know as a pictorial evocation of a grandmother’s bedtime folk fable with all its attendant mystery and tinge of terror to put the child to sleep.
Doctor turned filmmaker
The Mysuru doctor-turned-filmmaker made the film at the end of his one-year course in the television wing of Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India.
Shivamogga-born Chidananda S Naik, who is currently working on a Kannada feature film—having cut his teeth and honed his cinematic skills with shorts—has a body of shorts Whispers & Echoes (2021), Longing (Trishna; 2022), and To the Forgotten (Bhule Chuke Tules; 2023) under his repertoire.
(Edited by Sumavarsha Kandula)
