Filmmaker Sanju Surendran is no stranger to the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). Eight years after his debut feature Aedan: Garden of Desire premiered in the International Competition at the same festival, he returns to the section with his second film, If on a Winter’s Night (Khidki Gaav). This year, it is one of only two Malayalam titles in the international line-up at the 30th edition of the festival, which opens today and runs until December 19. The other film in the competition is Unnikrishnan Avala’s Thanthapperu (Life of a Phallus).
Returning once again, Sanju sees IFFK as more than a screening platform. It is a festival that has travelled alongside his own path as a filmmaker. Thinking about what has brought him back with If on a Winter’s Night, he reflects, “I was actually thinking about this recently. After FTII, we had to make our Diploma film. At the time, short films and documentaries were part of the festival. In 2007, my Diploma film was screened there. Since then, I’ve made two feature films.”
The homecoming feels significant because of his earlier connection with the festival. Aedan, drawn from three short stories by S Hareesh, competed in the 22nd edition of IFFK in 2017. It earned him the FIPRESCI award for Best Malayalam Film and the Rajatha Chakoram for Best Debut Director. The film later received the Second Best Film award at the Kerala State Film Awards in 2018, along with recognition for adapted screenplay, cinematography and sound editing.
Although If on a Winter’s Night had its world premiere earlier this year at the Busan International Film Festival, where it picked up the Hylife Vision Award, Sanju says the feeling of bringing the film home is something else entirely. “Watching your film in your own place is special. It truly is a homecoming,” he says.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sanju studied under the legendary Mani Kaul, an influence that still shows in his precise yet humane way of approaching cinema. Before he moved into fiction features, he made the 2014 documentary Kapila, which follows a day in the life of a Koodiyattam performer. It won the National Award for Best Documentary (Arts and Culture) and also received a Special Mention in the International Mid-Length Competition at Visions du Réel. That early grounding continues to shape his work, both in its form and emotional texture.
Set entirely in the suburbs of the capital city Delhi, If on a Winter’s Night follows Abhi and Sarah, a young Malayali couple who have moved to the city after college and are still trying to find their footing in a place that never quite sits comfortably with them. When the film begins, Sarah has just taken up a new job, and the two are living in a modest yet cosy upstairs partition of a house, held together by the quiet hope that they can build a life they feel at home in. Their days and nights are shaped by small comforts, bits of music, familiar routines, and the steady belief that they can lean on each other.
Sanju approaches the film in a way that is both intimate and quietly observational. “There were a few key themes we wanted to explore,” he says. “One is contemporary relationships and how they evolve in urban spaces. That includes long-distance relationships, online dating, and the way live-in relationships function today. This emotional thread runs alongside the narrative throughout the film.” In a city that can be unforgiving to outsiders, Abhi and Sarah’s relationship begins to feel the strain of economic uncertainty, mismatched expectations, and the quiet judgments around them.
Delhi sits at the centre of Sanju’s exploration. “I wanted to present Delhi not as a tourist postcard, but as a lived-in space experienced by young people. The city becomes another character in the film,” he says. Its size, its pace and its indifference heighten the vulnerability of those who arrive there, especially in winter. Space and climate, he adds, are tied closely to feeling.
“Delhi winters are particularly harsh, and I had always wanted to shoot the film during that time. Every year I waited, but it never quite worked out. This time, everything finally came together.” As the cold sets in, the rain and long nights deepen the unease that follows the characters, making them more aware of how uncertain life in the city can be. There are moments when winter seems close enough to push them towards the edges of a place they are still trying to call home.
That textured, lived-in sense of the city comes through in National Award-winner Manesh Madhavan’s cinematography, which looks at Delhi with a gentle closeness. Manesh, who also shot Sanju’s Aedan, brings a careful attention to the narrow staircases, rented rooms and shifting interiors, allowing them to reflect the emotional states of the people who move through them. Sanju remembers the film taking shape slowly, through a long and layered process. “There were many factors that came together for this story,” he says. “It began with a personal incident involving a friend, something that stayed with me. But on its own, it felt too small to turn into a feature.”
What changed it was a series of conversations with friends, each adding another thread and allowing different lives and struggles to meet within the same spaces. “During one such discussion, Rahul, who is a friend, mentioned Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Musafir from 1957, the black-and-white film co-written by Ritwik Ghatak,” says Sanju, who believes the thematic reach of the film stayed long with him. “Set within a rented space, the film explores life, death and marriage through three interconnected stories. It really stayed with me, especially because it dealt with subjects like intercaste marriage at a time when Hindi cinema was mostly concerned with class struggles.”
From that point, his own narrative for If on a Winter’s Night began to take form. “Over time, two more storylines were added to the central thread. After many conversations, Rekha Raj wrote the script. When she finally put it all down in one go, it read beautifully, almost like a novel.” These added threads open up the film’s emotional space. Simon, gentle and easygoing, is trying to find his place in a city that offers little room for comfort. Gopika, warm and lively, carries a quiet sadness she does not often speak about. Their circumstances differ, yet they mirror one another in small, familiar ways. All of them move through some form of homelessness, whether emotional, spiritual or literal, held together only by brief connections, small conversations and shared music.
Language, too, reflects the lived reality Sanju hoped to capture. “The main characters are Malayalis.. In everyday life, they move between Malayalam and Hindi without thinking about it, and that rhythm carries into the film,” says the filmmaker, who points out that the language shift happens naturally since the characters of their friends and landlords are native Hindi speakers.
Casting, he says, was handled with as much care as choosing locations. Roshan Abdul Rahoof, who plays Abhi, a young artist trying to find his footing in Delhi, was spotted on social media. “We reached out to Roshan through Instagram. He has a lovely innocence that suited the character,” says Sanju, who made Roshan go through a short workshop. “He can express a wide range of emotions quietly and with real control.”
Bhanu Priyamvada plays Sarah, a film festival employee whose income slowly becomes the couple’s main support as Abhi’s hopes run up against financial reality. She joined the film at the very last moment. “With independent films, actors often drop out because of other commitments, and that happened here as well. But when Bhanu came in at the final stage, she arrived completely committed,” reveals Sanju, adding that Roshan and Bhanu met only on set. “During the shoot in Delhi, there was an easy, natural chemistry between them, and it came through beautifully on screen.”
Sanju values flexibility while shooting, and believes in giving characters its required depth and space. “I like to move beyond the script once the actors and locations are in place and leave room for improvisation. That freedom helped us discover new moments,” says the filmmaker, who gives us a glimpse into other important characters, Gopika and Simon, played by Arathy KB and Jitheesh Raichel Samuel, a student of the KR Narayanan Institute. “Arathy (KB) plays Gopika. Sometimes an actor can seem simply fine on set, and then, when you watch the footage later, the performance turns out to be remarkable. Arathy was exactly like that. Simon's track runs alongside the main story, and his scenes almost feel like a short film within the film. He brought a gentle grace to the role.”
Clarifying the influence of Musafir, Sanju says it was never meant as a template. “Musafir became the springboard, a starting point, and from there the story moved in different directions. The idea of different lives passing through a shared space stayed with me,” says Sanju, who ensured that his sophomore film was distinctly different from his debut, despite certain similarities. "In Aedan, the narratives were clearly separated. However, here, the stories overlap gently and slip into one another. It is more of a relationship film, centred on human connections within an urban setting.”
The film also grew with the support of All We Imagine As Light filmmaker Payal Kapadia, who later joined as executive producer. If on a Winter’s Night, which gently touches on some of the themes present in Payal’s Cannes Grand Prix du Jury-winning film, particularly its interest in urban intimacy and the experiences of Malayalis living outside Kerala, seems to have spoken to her. “I showed Payal a rough cut of the film, and we had a long online discussion about it,” Sanju says, adding, “She connected strongly with it and talked at length about the parts she liked, while also giving very honest feedback about what didn’t work for her.” Her decision to come on board arrived afterwards, and Sanju sees it as “a very generous and meaningful gesture.”
On the current state of independent cinema in India, a clear-headed Sanju says, “There have been many strong Indian films in recent years that have picked up awards at places like Venice and Sundance, yet even they struggle to get proper theatrical releases.” Asserting that festivals remain essential for such films, Sanju points to a more basic problem. “The real problem is that India still lacks a proper ecosystem for independent cinema. OTT platforms aren't an easy solution either," says the filmmaker, who reiterates that this isn't an indie-centric problem alone. "Even people working in the mainstream are concerned. Also, platforms like Netflix are not very open to Malayalam films at the moment. It feels like a dicey, transitional phase.”
Even as If on a Winter’s Night returns home to IFFK, Sanju is already thinking about what comes next. With this film marking a deeper engagement with space and intimacy, he has begun shaping his upcoming project. “I’m planning my next film based on Hareesh’s script, titled Kothiyan. The scripting is complete, and I’m in talks for production,” he says. The upcoming project, selected for the Kerala Film Market at IFFK and earlier recognised at Film Bazaar in Goa, centres on obsession.