CIFF 2025 | Little Thomas: Kaushal Oza debuts with a children’s feature, starring Gulshan Devaiah & Rasika Dugal

(Clockwise, from left) Filmmaker Kaushal Oza at CIFF 2025, Chandigarh (Photo: Tanushree Ghosh); his feature debut 'Little Thomas'; his short film 'The Miniaturist of Junagadh'.

France has been keen on investing in striking stories from India since the success of Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning All We Imagine as Light. When Kaushal Oza, whose debut feature film the comedy-drama Little Thomas script was a part of the Syndicate Script Lab in Amsterdam in 2016, was looking to raise funds for it at the NFDC Film Bazaar co-production market in Goa, what he faced with a French producer was a case of acute asininity. The said Frenchman told him that his film wasn’t even Indian because its character is called Thomas and the family goes to church, ‘does India have Christians even?’ Oza refused to partake of such euphoria of dopiness.

“We have to write our stories and pitch it to people who are not as familiar with our culture,” says Oza, who premiered Little Thomas at the just-concluded 2nd Cinevesture International Film Festival in Chandigarh, where fellow independent filmmakers, with hope-filled eyes, were making a beeline for the festival’s chief guest Mathieu Béjot, the attaché for audiovisual, cinema and digital content at the Embassy of France / French Institute in India, who was very patiently perusing through every project coming his way. Unless Westerners come and live here and see the reality for themselves, stereotypes will remain a roadblock for Indian indies to navigate, if they are looking to collaborate internationally.

Oza chooses to distance himself from the tag of an indie filmmaker, he would rather be called an “independent-minded filmmaker”, even as he is raising and pitching his films independently, because “some of my finance has come from a studio and outside producers,” but, he concurs, “I’m not a system person.” Oza is Kapadia’s senior and Prateek Vats’ (Eeb Allay Ooo!) batchmate from Film and Television Institute of India, Pune (2006-11). “Eeb Allay Ooo! is a truly independent film,” adds Oza, “They had a minuscule budget and a 10-people crew, with everyone doing everything. While I had vanity vans on my set. There’s a difference.”

A still from 'Little Thomas'.

Little Thomas, which stars child-actor Hridansh Parekh, Rasika Dugal and Gulshan Devaiah, is a feel-good family film in Hindi, set in Goa in the early ’90s, about a seven-year-old boy Thomas Miranda who wants a little brother and for that he has to reunite his quarrelling parents and make them kiss — a yucky act, for the child. The film is told from the child’s perspective. This is his third project with Dugal, after a music video and the short film The Miniaturist of Junagadh (2021; available on YouTube). “That music video was poetry and she (Dugal) has sung it. I really like her performance. She’s a very good actor, she fits and looks the part and then you can’t imagine naybody else in that part,” says Mumbai-based Oza at the Chandigarh festival.

With just one short film, set in the post-Partition era telling the tale of one family on the verge of leaving behind their everything, very Garm Hava-like, Oza established his potential: his hold over the craft and a visceral world-building that spoke to our deepest inner truths. Every viewing of The Miniaturist… is like leaving a last sip of tea in the cup as a marker of the hope of one’s return to his home (Junagadh), as Naseeruddin Shah’s character Husyn Naqqash says in the film. Oza takes refuge in the past to speak of and for the present. The loss of one’s home, one’s roots, one’s identity and sense of belonging, one’s art, and one’s eyesight. An inheritance of loss so to speak. Loss completes the trifecta of love and longing. As Raj Arun’s Kishorilal says, Chuppi hi zubaan hai (silence is sonorous), he speaks for a nation of deafening silence: those silenced and those choosing to remain silent. A lot gets said when one says nothing at all. “I try and leave gaps for the actor to interpret and bring the subtext out,” says the director.

Oza, 40, hails from a family of lawyers, with nothing to do with films. The prime motivation for him to make The Miniaturist of Junagadh was to preserve the place it’s shot in — his ancestral house, his grandfather’s house in Mumbai, where he grew up and which was being pulled down. “To have the memory of the house preserved on film,” he says, adding that spatiotemporally “you may be telling a story about Partition, but in terms of values for a just society, it stands in for today’s time.”

And that is Oza’s style. “That film is quite political. If you want to ignore the politics of it, it’s very easy to ignore. But the statement is firm, assertive, although softly said,” he adds, “I’ve been lucky in the sense that it went to a lot of festivals and then immediately it got picked up and went on YouTube. It was seen quite a bit and then it went on Hotstar and Amazon now. I think people watched that film and their word-of-mouth kind of gave a push or a lift to my pitch for Little Thomas.”

Stills from 'The Miniaturist of Junagadh' (2021).

The Miniaturist of Junagadh — also starring Padmavati Rao, Rasika Dugal and Uday Chandra — was adapted from Stefan Zweig’s German short story Die Unsichtbare Sammlung (The Invisible Collection), 1925. Oza’s English-Gujarati short FTII diploma film After Glow was also a literary adaptation, inspired from Rohinton Mistry’s short story Condolence Visit, which was a part of Mistry’s collection Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987). It played in Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and also won the now-discontinued National Award for the Best Non-Feature Film on Family Welfare in 2012.

Oza wanted to be a writer but wasn’t sure whether of books or in films. Going to FTII gave him the direction he sought. Not only did he learn the technicalities of filmmaking, he picked up insights into literature and painting, William Shakespeare and Impressionism, among others, from his peers.

The only time Oza fanboyed was when Kundan Shah came to conduct a workshop on writing comedy at FTII and he, then, like an annoying student, shared his own unfinished script with Shah for feedback because he wasn’t happy with what he’d written. A devout fan of Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1994), and a keeper of the copies of Shah’s handwritten scripts for Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa and Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983), Oza recalls what Shah told him. “‘Right now, you like the idea of what you are writing and it’s a very clever idea. You are trying to be clever in the script but that’s not good enough. You will have to find something that you want to say in the story. And the day you find what you really want to say, not how intelligent the idea is, that is the day when you will finish the script’,” recalls Oza, adding, “And that’s what happened. It was three years after FTII that I found what it was philosophically that I was trying to say through that story. When that happened, the script wrote itself.” Oza was in the last class that Mani Kaul taught at FTII, who used to exhort the students to “Go outside. Films cannot be made in a class. Pick a location, go and spend two days there, shoot something and come back and then we’ll have a class,” Oza says, adding, “You get an insight into the thought processes of these people.” The same legacy, same heritage, same school of thinking continues.

What does it take to make one’s first feature? Oza says, “a lot of perseverance and a lot of ignorance. Because if you would know the reality of pitching, you would never get into it. It takes years of waiting.” For him, the roadblock is “talking to a mainstream audience. Even though we have made it (Little Thomas) independently, it’s destined for a mainstream audience, for a family audience. It’s not something what is called a ‘festival film’. You have to know your audience now. For example, if you have a film like Girls will Be Girls, you better see it as a Sundance festival film. The actor has won in Sundance because the kind of audience that it is talking to will be attracted to films like that. I don’t know if the film is talking to II/III-tier town audience. Not every film can talk to everyone,” he says.

“We want to tell stories set in India for an Indian audience. But to get money for that, we have to go out. And that I feel is the biggest challenge,” says Oza, whose Little Thomas, has been “sold to a channel and I don’t know how the channel monetizes it.” He adds, “You want a theatre release because nothing beats that, since you’re making films for that and emotions. It’s nicer to see films on a big screen and you just feel things a little bit more, it’s also a community experience. If I want to make a Little Thomas, I don’t have to raise a budget for a film like Baahubali. But my film’s release might clash with a Baahubali. So, to tide over that competition, one needs an intelligent producer and distributor to write success stories.” Little Thomas, which had its world premiere at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne (IFFM), marks producer Anurag Kashyap’s first foray into children’s cinema since his 2007 animated directorial venture Return of Hanuman. Kashyap told Variety magazine that “children’s film is a difficult genre” to make, and authentic storytelling is even more difficult. Over 700 children were auditioned to cast Thomas and his friends, says Oza. The film is produced by Luminoso Pictures, Civic Studios, Flip Films and Kashyap’s Good Bad Films.

Good script is paramount, believes Kashyap. What about marketing? “There’s no end to marketing,” says Oza. Indie champion Sean Baker’s 2025 Oscar-winning Anora, for instance, spent three times ($18 million) of its film budget ($6 million) on its Oscar campaign. So, one needs to devise interesting ways of marketing a small film. “Last year, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall got its dog to campaign for the film at the Oscars. When you are an independent filmmaker, you can’t go head to head with commercial films. Then, you try and do these intelligent things,” says Oza.