At the Marché du Film, the largest film market in the world at the Cannes Film Festival beginning next week, is a rare animation film project from India. Heirloom, Kolkata-born filmmaker Upamanyu Bhattacharyya's film in development, revisits Ahmedabad's fabled handloom heritage, under threat today from modern machines, in a tinge of nostalgia.

Part of five projects in development selected by the Hong Kong - Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF) under its HAF Goes to Cannes annual programme, Heirloom will pitch for co-production, sale and distribution among global industry representatives at Marché du Film taking place along with the Cannes festival, to be held from May 14 to 25.

Kolkata-born Bhattacharyya, who studied animation filmmaking at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, will put international focus back on the centuries-old textile tradition of Ahmedabad, called the Manchester of East, and India's animation film industry, announcing its arrival through recent world class production Bombay Rose.

Tradition vs modernity

A period drama set in Ahmedabad in the '60s, Heirloom tells the story of a young couple whose life changes when they accidentally discover a tapestry illustrating their entire family history through memories and stories.

The Hindi and English language film portrays the struggles of Kirti, the husband who spends a fortune building a handloom museum, and his wife, Sonal, who thinks they should instead enter the powerloom business to secure their family’s future.

The family's conflict is brought to the screen through raw 2D animation and traditional fabrics brought to life with stop-motion embroidery and patchwork, a leitmotif of Ahmedabad's rich textile heritage.

"The entire film background is hand-painted using paint and pencil on paper while the character animation is made digitally," says Bhattacharyya, who graduated from NID in animation film design in 2014.

"It is a story about nostalgia or giving into it or moving ahead," adds the director, whose first drawings in NID classes were houses in Ahmedabad's Old City that resonates with its vibrant textile traditions in creaking wooden looms. "The city was changing a lot in the '60s."

Animation and Ahmedabad

"Ahmedabad was the first city I had the joy of discovering alone, and the city I began drawing. When we learnt how to draw buildings, it was the houses in the Old City we were sketching. These sketches from twelve years ago are the basis of the art direction of Heirloom," explains Bhattacharyya, whose first animation film was Wade, a short film set in Kolkata dealing with climate change.

"Ahmedabad is a sensory overload of a city, and ‘change’ seems to be its one-word motto. The city has witnessed tectonic shifts over the last few decades alone," says the director, who spent long hours in NID's well-equipped textile department and stepped out of campus to learn more about the history of the city's textile industry.

Wade, which went to the Annecy International Animated Film Festival near Annecy, the French city in the foothills of the Mont Blanc mountain, in 2020 showed a conflict between humans and tigers in a flooded Kolkata doomed by a rising sea.

"I started writing Heirloom in the beginning of the pandemic and participated in an artistic development and mentorship programme at the Annecy festival's residency in 2021," says Bhattacharyya.

Pitching for fame

"It was an animation story from the very beginning. We later received a development grant from HAF and won the best non-Hong Kong pitch this year for its annual Cannes film market programme," he adds.

Bhattacharyya and his producers, Arya A Menon and Shubham Karna – both came on board during a crowdfunding exercise – are currently assembling a team of artists and animators, some of them from NID, for the film that has completed pre-production.

"The animation production will begin soon. We are looking at a few years for completing the project," says Bhattacharyya. “We participated in the Animation Day at Marché du Film last year as part of five projects represented by the Annecy festival in Cannes. It was good for us. We will continue from where we left off last year doing follow-ups and looking at new possibilities for sale, distribution and coproduction.”

HAF Goes to Cannes will offer Bhattacharyya the opportunity to pitch Heirloom to potential domestic and international collaborators in a 15-minute presentation of material that includes stills and animation from the film.

One of the last Indian films to benefit from HAF Goes to Cannes in the past was Assamese film Village Rockstars by Rima Das, which pitched at the Cannes film market in 2017. The film went on to have a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the National Award for Best Feature Film in 2018.

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