Yashasvi Juyal did not pitch his way into filmmaking. He shot his way in.
“We never went through the route of pitching from development,” the Indian filmmaker says of “The Ink Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb,” his debut feature, which premieres in the Proxima Competition at Karlovy Vary. “We shot the film and then we started pitching.”
The film follows Rajji, a toll booth worker in North India, whose lover Santosh dies in a truck accident and returns 24 hours later as a spectral presence, drifting between memory and the disappearing world of the highway toll booth where they worked. For Juyal, the setup was not a genre exercise. It was reporting.
“Ghost for us is something which exists. We don’t believe that it’s in stories,” Juyal says of growing up in the upper Himalayas, where the film’s supernatural register comes from. “Many times we just talk about it naturally that, ‘Oh, you saw a ghost yesterday?’ My friend say, ‘Oh, I saw day before yesterday.’ So, it’s like as common as that, and we all have had our experiences in the upper Himalayas.”
That folklore has a specific source. “It’s also a tribute to my grandmother,” Juyal says, “because my grandmother used to live in a village in the upper Himalayas, and she had this relation with the supernatural that she used to tell me very naturally.”
