Filmmaker Shashank Walia's Birds in the Dark and Selvi, the debut film by Tamil writer-director Sailesh Rathnakumar, have been selected as the Indian films set to premiere at the Busan International Film Festival.
Birds in the Dark is set in Punjab and revolves around a disillusioned police agent and an accused man who find unexpected love and human connection amidst a rising farm revolution.
It is produced by Reema Kaur alongside Hansal Mehta and Sahil Saigal under the banner True Story Films.
Selvi features National Award-winning actor Anjali Patil, who is also producing the film.
The films will be screened in the Vision - Asia section of the 31st Busan International Film Festival, which will start on October 6, according to a press release.
Selvi is set within the largely unseen world of home-care workers and explores care, migration, friendship, guilt, exhaustion and the determination.
Rathnakumar worked on the script with cinematographer Bargav Sridhar, from their observation of the home-care nurses who attended Bargav's mother through months of critical illness - migrant women from smaller towns in Tamil Nadu, living in modest hostels, working daily in homes nothing like their own. Sailesh, himself a migrant from Coimbatore to Chennai.
“Selvi is about a woman moving through an ordinary day. I wanted the film to move with her, to stay close to her life without explaining it or asking it to mean more than it already does," Rathnakumar said in a statement.
The actor said the film emerged as a "way of reclaiming creative independence for stories that need patience to be told" for her. "It is a personal, intimate observation of the ordinary people in healthcare who spend their lives caring for others, even as their own lives quietly wither. Premiering at Busan is a milestone we're incredibly proud of. We would be bringing Selvi back home, to the people to whom it truly belongs," she said.
The film is produced by the Red Sea Fund, a Red Sea International Film Festival initiative, and is supported by Hong Kong Asia Film Financing.