The Powerful Short Film Winning Hearts

Rapists do have families. 'I wanted to see how a father or mother would deal with it.' 'They go through shame as well and get discriminated against from the rest of the village.' 'Why don't we show it that way?'

Hyderabad-based film-maker Anusha Rao depicts a fictional story of a rapist's family against the backdrop of the pandemic in her 29-minute Telugu short-film, Swarna.

Rao's film is a painful and poetic tale that explores human emotions and intertwines themes of shame, despair, hope and redemption.

Shot at a relative's home in Nizamabad, Telangana, the film features a troika of novice actors, the townspeople, who come sans any experience in acting.

Rao says she found these people randomly and preferred them over trained actors from Hyderabad and Mumbai.

An engineer by degree, Rao grew up in a household that adores Satyajit Ray's and Guru Dutt's films. She worked with Arka Mediaworks (the makers of Baahubali) in the marketing and international distribution department, an experience that shaped up the film-maker in her.

Later, she received her Associates in Science of Film from the Los Angeles Film School, which eventually kicked off her journey as film-maker with indie projects.

Produced by film-maker Venkatesh Maha, Swarna was first shown at the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) in 2022 and is now doing the rounds at various public screenings in India.

"People in my village don't watch films, so they have no sense of it. Because they don't know methods of acting, the only tool they use is to draw it from their own life,"

Even though Swarna is set in a Telugu-speaking state, it reminded me of rural life in Maharashtra -- be it that rustic house, spattering of cow dung water on floor, dot rangoli, the kitchen utensils... It felt so authentic. How much of your own observations and experiences went into making this film?

The film was shot at my father's hometown at Nizamabad, which is two hours from Hyderabad.