A story of courage

A cinephile since a young age,Mumbai-based Bhutiani enrolled for the direction programme at the School of Visual Arts in New York soon after he finished his schooling. After the mass shooting at a gurudwara in Wisconsin,US,in 2012,his teacher’s story came back to him. “The story was as fresh in my mind as the day I first heard it. It is a look at one of our darkest moments in history,told through a school teacher and her student. I wanted to take that story to others and cinema became the medium,” he says.

Kush is a small-budget film,shot over a period of five days at the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai. Although in the short film format,the making offered a set of challenges to the crew. “There was a bandh on the first day of our shoot,so our team ended up wasting a lot of time rescheduling the film. We also shot in a way that gave the actors,particularly the children,a break,” he says. The original film was 40 minutes long,but when Bhutiani’s father suggested they send it to international festivals,they edited it to its current length.

Bhutiani says he feels honoured that Kush is being screened at the festival. “If I was told last year that Kush would open at the Venice International Film Festival,I would not have believed it. But I suppose people from around the world connect to stories of courage amid terror and discrimination,and violence against religions has been experienced all over the world,” he adds.