The Alchemist

We’re sitting in the cafeteria of the capital’s British Council, the venue of India’s third annual Digital Film Festival. Khosa is a jury member at the event, which also saw the premiere of his latest film, Flower Girl. The film—Khosa calls it a lyrical poem on celluloid—is his attempt to capture man’s relationship with the environment. ‘‘It’s about a young girl who turns into a flower tree and how she is exploited by the owner. After a point, you gravitate to a more personal level of interpretation,’’ he says.

Khosa, a dropout from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, is a graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. He followed that up with a course from the Royal College of Arts, London, in 1991. His 85-minute debut short feature film, Dance of the Wind, won a lot of critical acclaim (including an award at the Chicago Film Festival) when it hit the circuit in 1997.

But Satori is definitely his most ambitious project yet. To be directed by Nalin, it is the story of the spiritual quest of a martial arts exponent and his travails on the way. ‘‘The film is mounted on a grand scale, almost like an epic. We are already on our sixth draft,’’ he reveals. The cast is yet to be finalised. ‘‘It’s upto Fred, really, and besides, we are so immersed in the script that I don’t think we shall be able to think objectively about it,’’ he says. The film has music by Sandesh Shandilya of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham fame.

Shandilya won’t be Khosa’s only link with Bollywood. After digital and short films, he is planning to go mainstream with two full length feature films. ‘‘You have to be in the system to bend the rules,’’ he smiles. ‘‘I like Bollywood, but there’s too much of non-realism in our movies.’’ The first of the two, Mother Tongue, is a thriller about

a man searching for his mother who is deeply entrenched in a tantric cult.

The second film will be scripted by Bhavani Iyer, who also co-wrote Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black. ‘‘It is the story of a small-town boy who comes to the city to make it big and the trip that changes his life,’’ reveals Khosa. A take-off from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist? ‘‘The spiritual content is the only thing in common. The film is more about a journey across cultures.’’

Going by his journey so far, it should be well worth the wait.