India's Chidananda S Naik wins Cannes La Cinef first prize for Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know, Mansi Maheshwari wins third prize

Mysuru's Chidananda Naik (second from left) has won the first prize at La Cinef sidebar at the 77th Cannes Film Festival for his FTII diploma film 'Sunflowers were the First Ones to Know...'; India-born Mansi Maheshwari (first from left), from British Film School, has won the third prize for her animation short 'Bunnyhood' at La Cinef. (Photo: Festival de Cannes via Instagram)

Mysuru's Chidananda Naik's FTII student film Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know... has bagged the first prize at 'La Cinef' sidebar at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.

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Chidanand Naik, who is by profession a doctor, becomes the second student/alum from Pune's Film and Television Institute of India to win the La Cinef top/first prize, for 'Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know...', which is the first Kannada film ever to show at Cannes, After Asmita Guha Neogi won the award for CatDog in 2020, which was the only Indian film that year in Cannes Film Festival, which did not have a physical edition owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know... competed among 18 short films, out of which 14 were live-action shorts and four were animated films, selected from a pool of 2,263 entries submitted by film schools from all over the world.

Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know..., shot by Suraj Thakur, edited by Manoj V and sound is by Abhishek Kadam, is based on a Kannada folktale, is about an old woman who steals a rooster and plunges her village into an unending state of darkness. The film festival screened this 16-minute short fiction film On Tuesday afternoon.

Naik has studied medicine at Mysore Medical College and later joined FTII to pursue film direction. Payal Kapadia and Maisam Ali, who represented India at the Cannes, with their films All We Imagine As Light and In Retreat, respectively, are also FTII alumnus. Last year, Yudhajit Basu's FTII diploma film Nehemich was at La Cinef.

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India-born Mansi Maheshwari's animation short 'Bunnyhood' won the third prize at La Cinef this year. The film was made as part of Maheshwari’s graduation project for National Film and Television School in England. “The film is a horror-comedy and since the story was sorted, it gave me a lot of freedom to experiment with not just the technique but also the frames, sound, etc. This film was born out of experimentation,” the Bunnyhood director told Hindustan Times.

A still from Kannada film 'Sunflowers were the First Ones to Know...' and its director Chidananda S Naik.

La Cinef is a sidebar competition for film schools at Cannes Film Festival. The section was previously called Cinéfondation and its name changed to La Cinef since 2022.