THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It was one great gig, but the performers on stage and the audience down below came from the world of ants. With their heads bobbing up and down to the rhythm of music, the ants were having a whale of a time. Interrupting the music was a sudden carpet bombing of sorts, wiping out the whole ant tribe. The story of the lone survivor, done in animation, is what got Sajan Sindhu the Golden Camera award at the Nashik International Film Festival, held as a tribute to the vision of the legendary Dadasaheb Phalke, the father of Indian cinema. Sajan, a native of Kozhikode, now settled in Attapadi, was in the city on an official visit. ‘’The film, ‘Pachilakoodu’, is dedicated to those children who lost their lives in the Endosulfan mishap in Kasargod district,’’ he said. The film took shape from a bedtime story he narrated to his son Manav, when the boy was about five years old. Manav wanted his father to show him the story in visuals, an idea that Sajan absorbed and translated into animation many years later. It took him more than a year to complete the film. The story revolves around the lives of the ant and a tiny green caterpillar that breaks out of a white egg. Ice breaks in a jiffy and the two lonely creatures become friends. At times, the ant even doubles up as a parent for the little caterpillar. Being the father of two little children helped Sajan quite a lot in making the film. ‘’The mannerisms of the ant was something I borrowed from my son. The caterpillar has expressions of my daughter Mithra,’’ he revealed. While the story of the ant moves backward to the past when the ant colony was live and full and ant mothers used to rock ant babies in green leafy cradles, the caterpillar’s life moves forward. The little creature that the ant held in its arms grows and grows and moves into the pupa stage. All that the baffled ant could do is put his ears on to the pupa’s wall and check the heartbeat. Once again, like a jolt out of the blue, the ant hears the Endosulfan-spraying machine again. The earlier massacre fresh in his mind, the ant covers the pupa with all the leaves he can find. ‘’Since the film is for kids, I decided not to end it in a tragedy,’’ said Sajan, who won awards for the film at the International Documentary and Short Film Fest organised by Chalachitra Academy and the All-India Children’s Educational Film Festival by NCERT in Delhi. An alumnus of Farooq College in Kozhikode, Sajan started trekking into the forests right from the age of 18 and it was these treks that brought him closer to nature. Currently working as a freelance animator, Sajan is now involved with the pre-production work of a new film that he has titled ‘Kayyeni.’ Setting the story once again in the animal world, fantasy takes you to a place where every ‘ooru’ is inhabited by one kind of animal and each of these have names like ‘muyalooru,’ ‘mayilooru’ and so on. ‘’The protagonist is a little bunny rabbit who goes around looking for this lost seed called ‘Kayyeni.’ I have tried to bring in the politics of new generation seeds, GM crops, after-effects and politics of Green Revolution,’’ said Sajan. Interestingly, the seed-keepers in the film are all non-vegetarians, hinting at the multinational corporations who take patents for crops and seeds. Sajan is married to Sindhu, who teaches at the alternative school ‘Sarang’ in Attapadi and has been a constant source of inspiration for Sajan.
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