Mysuru filmmaker bags Cannes La Cinef first prize

In a major triumph for India at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, Chidananda S Naik's "Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know..." won the first prize of La Cinef on Thursday.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."Sunflowers..." is based on a Kannada folk tale about an old woman who steals a rooster.Shivamogga-born, Mysore-based Naik is in Cannes with three principal crew members – director of photography Suraj Thakur, sound designer Abhishek Kadam and production designer Pranav Khot. The film was shot on location in Pune. Because it is about a village where the sun stops rising, "Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know..." had to be shot in darkness.Naik has an MBBS degree. He gravitated towards filmmaking after practising medicine for a while.“Night is a character in the film,” says Naik. “It was a challenge considering the limited resources we had at our disposal.”
The film, the director said, was “challenging to shoot.” “We had only four days. I was basically told not to make this film. It’s based on folklore from Karnataka,in India. These are the stories we grew up with, so I was carrying this idea since my childhood.In the film, an elderly woman steals a rooster and deprives a village of sunlight.Jurors Lubna Azabal, who was the president, Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, Claudine Nougaret, Paolo Moretti and Vladimir Perišić, also decided to award joint second prize to “The Chaos She Left Behind” by Nikos Kolioukos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – Greece) and “Out the Window Through the Wall” by Asya Segalovich (Columbia University – U.S).Claudine Nougaret praised the first one for “remarkable acting and writing full of finesse.”