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.”
The film’s central character is drawn from life. Juyal had interviewed real toll booth workers for a short documentary, and one of them, also named Santosh, was living with a girlfriend near the booth who was saving money for a physics degree while their relationship strained under the pressures of work and separation. Toll stations, Juyal notes, are also some of the most dangerous spots on India’s highways, with accidents a near-constant occurrence. Running into the real Santosh again amid that backdrop, Juyal asked him if the danger scared him. “I said that, ‘You’re still working here, are you not scared?'” Juyal recalls. “So, he said that, ‘I am not that, I have died and I am a ghost.'” The joke became the seed of the film.
Behind the ghost story is a more concrete anxiety: infrastructure. Juyal describes commuting constantly between Dehradun and Delhi as a new highway reshaped his hometown, and a real accident, a truck crashing into a booth near his house, left him watching workers tape up the structure “as if it’s a human being.” The image of pre- and post-highway village life, and of his own family’s generations-long migration from Karachi through the upper Himalayas to Dehradun, feeds directly into the film’s sense of people caught in transit.
Humor runs alongside the grief, by design rather than accident in the edit. “I strongly felt that humor is the most… strong tool to identify the character,” Juyal says, adding that spending time with workers under a flyover during their off-hours, including while they drank, shaped the film’s tone as much as its script did.
Influences arrived from outside India as much as within it. Juyal cites Apichatpong Weerasethakul for a shared interest in regional folklore and man-animal relationships, and experimental filmmaker Scott Barley for a way of building image and sound around abstraction rather than conventional narrative. Documentarian Shaunak Sen, who serves as executive producer on the film, offered a working model as much as mentorship. Sen’s “All That Breathes” was nominated for the 2023 Academy Award and won prizes at Cannes and Sundance, among more than two dozen other festivals. “Shaunak has always been this huge inspiration,” Juyal says. “If they can do it then we should also try to do it.”
The funding came after the shoot, and in stages: a Take Ten grant from the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity got the production moving, a selection at the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum introduced the team to the Red Sea Fund, and a one-on-one mentorship with Spike Lee through the Red Sea Directors Program followed. The Red Sea Post-Production Fund came next, then the Prasad Lab DI Award for post-production at NFDC’s Film Bazaar in Goa, and Visions Sud Est after Juyal’s short documentary “Rains Don’t Make Us Happy Anymore” premiered at Visions du Réel. “Everything fell into place by the end,” Juyal says. “This film is a pure effort of just working till the end and developing and developing, and got the funding somehow.”
The film stars Dheeraj Kumar as Santosh and Bhumika Dube as Rajji, and is produced by Vikas Kumar, Sharib Khan, Viraj Sikand, Bhavna Kankaria and Neha Kaul, a team whose recent credits include Anuparna Roy’s Venice Horizons winner “Songs of Forgotten Trees.”