The top prize for Best Short at Cannes 2024 went to Indian director Chidananda S. Naik's Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know, marking a significant victory for the country. This achievement comes after the 2020 victory of Ashmita Guha Neogi, who won India's second first prize in five years for her film CatDog. The coveted La Cinef awards were unveiled on May 23.
Chidananda S. Naik, an FTII student, won the competition with her film Sunflowers
Were the First Ones to Know, out of a total of 17 films. Of the 2,263
submissions that 555 film schools from around the world submitted, these films
were chosen as 18 of them. Cannes will present the top prize of 15,000 euros,
the second prize of 11,250 euros, and the third prize of 7,500 euros.
In the same category, Mansi Maheshwari's Bunnyhood took third prize. The director of the UK-produced movie is an Indian who hails from Meerut. Mansi Maheshwari's capstone project at London's National Film Television School (NFTS) was Bunnyhood. Her birthplace is Meerut.
Speaking to a tabloid about the same topic, Chidananda told, "We had only four days. I was basically told not to make this film. It’s based on folklore from Karnataka (in India). These are the stories we grew up with, so I have been carrying this idea since my childhood."
After completing a year-long curriculum at the Film and Television Institute of India, the director made this film. It's based on a Kannada folktale about an elderly woman who engulfs her village in a never-ending darkness after stealing a rooster. Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know, a 16-minute short film, shows the chaos that the elderly woman's actions brought upon a hamlet. When a prophecy is used in an effort to retrieve the rooster, the old woman's family is exiled.
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