Official trailer
Film coming soon
YouTube / Vimeo link reserved
A film by Biju Kurup
An Ode to
Black Ants
A fantasy satire about identity, memory and the earlier lives that march quietly within us.
01 / The film
Logline
A theatre group is close to breaking apart. Two actors discover unusually similar dreams of a previous birth and a possible way back to one another.
Set across Gujarat, the film travels between the urban and the rural, the present and the dream. Its landscapes encompass Kutch, Adivasi Tejghat, the architectural relics of Sidhpur and the old city of Ahmedabad.
Its cinematic architecture draws from Bhavai, Gujarat's travelling theatre of satire: multi-voiced, non-linear and open to interruption.
02 / Story
When memory refuses to stay in the past.
Sita gathers the members of a multicultural theatre group at the Sidhpur home of Iqbal, a founder now paralysed and locked inside his body. To ease the tension, Kabir describes a dream in which he was a blind Bhavai performer in an earlier life.
Sita then reveals a recurring dream of her own: she was his wife, and a performer in the same troupe. Their accounts become a mirror through which the group's members interpret identity, history and their dependence on one another.
Read the full story
The narrative moves between different views of these two dreams. Sound becomes memory for Kabir; speech remains impossible for Iqbal. Reality bleeds into dream as present bodies host earlier selves, and the group confronts the very thing it has forgotten: interdependence is a strength.
03 / Watch
Trailer & teasers
Reserved for the official festival trailer and two teaser films.
Teaser01
Film coming soon
YouTube / Vimeo link reserved
Teaser02
Film coming soon
YouTube / Vimeo link reserved
04 / Director's statement
“Black ants move through dust and debris as people move through time: unnoticed, burdened, yet bound together by the necessity to continue.”
An Ode to Black Ants is both a tribute and a question: to the invisible labours of art and memory, to the resilience of those who endure in silence, and to the lives, past and present, that march quietly within us.
Ants are small yet collective, silent yet relentless; they carry burdens far beyond their size, as we carry fragments of older lives, traditions and dreams. Sound and silence become dramaturgy here. What remains is the hum of identity itself.
05 / Screen grabs
Selected frames
Images from the film, presented in their original widescreen ratio.
06 / Behind the scenes
The production diary
On location with the cast and crew across Gujarat.
07 / Filmmaker
Screenplay, editing & direction
Biju Kurup
Biju Kurup studied Fine Arts at M. S. University, Baroda, followed by a postgraduate diploma in Film Editing at the Film and Television Institute of India. His practice spans independent feature films, documentaries, advertising and animation.
He has edited twelve feature films across Malayalam, Hindi, English, Marathi, Gujarati and Arabic, and worked on more than seventy commissioned documentaries. In 2021, he joined NID Ahmedabad as Senior Associate Faculty, with a focus on transmedia and interactive storytelling.
08 / Credits
Produced by
Storytellers Combine
& Ujwala Shankar Mahale
- Screenplay, editing & direction
- Biju Kurup
- Cinematography
- Rahul Deep
- Music
- Rajesh Naroth
- Sound design & mixing
- Issac Newton
- Colourist
- Bipin Varma
- Production design
- Arjun P. S.
- Costume
- Sethulakshmi
- VFX
- Vivek Suvarna
- Executive producer
- Samir Devalya
Co-producers
Mahipal Bishnoi · Dr. Deepthynadh Reghunadhan · Shibeesh K Chandran · Allen Thomas · Rajesh Naroth · Vivek Suvarna · Rahul Deep · Ranjitha Philipose · Shankar Mahale
Cast
Pratik Rathod · Pooja Purohit · Garima Bharadwaj · Suraj Nayak · Aditya Dhingra · Suraj Kurup · Jayaraj Freeman · Savita Sharma · Anshul Kumar · Paru · Ravi Ranjan · Kunjadiya Yasvi · Nilesh Brahmbhatt
09 / The collective
STORYTELLERS
COMBINE
Artists connected by cinematic storytelling.
Storytellers Combine is a collective of filmmakers, visual artists and academics. Its activities began in Mumbai in 2009 at Cuttingsaloon Studio, producing crafted documentaries, commercials and independent film forms.
Today the collective connects artists across the world to create international projects with distinct artistic qualities and to explore new modes of cinematic storytelling.