‘Titli’ Director Kanu Behl’s Next Short Film ‘Binnu Ka Sapna’ Wins The Student Jury Prize For Best Short At The Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2019

Jyothi Venkatesh 

Produced by Terribly Tiny Talkies and Colosceum Media, Binnu Ka Sapna is a 32-minute narrative short that plunges into a malignant psyche, exposing the ticking time bombs around us and the sparks that set them off. It goes through the harrowing transformation of a victim into an attacker, with society only serving as a catalyst. It marks the debut of Chetan Sharma as the titular Binnu. Kanu Behl the director of Binnu Ka Sapna says, “I’m thrilled with the honor. It was a pleasure to see Binnu connect with a larger audience and to experience their reactions and love for the film first hand. I now eagerly look forward to the film’s release where it truly belongs - in India.”

Binnu has grown up hearing about his mother's first slap, 25 years ago; hit by his father merely for emerging from the same room as her own brother-in-law. Many years later, he leaves home. At a party, he sleeps with his Boss’ daughter, who he falls in love with. But things don’t go as planned. Binnu leaves town. Engaging in another romance in another city. But something is not quite right. Slowly, a strange paranoia begins to engulf his being. ‘Binnu Ka Sapna’ delves deep into a malignant mindset, trying to bare the ticking time bombs around us and illuminate the wicks that light them. 

The Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival is the world's largest film festival dedicated to short films. In term of audience and professional presence, it is the second largest film festival in France after Cannes. The festival is at the heart of many activities and missions conducted all year long by the collective Sauve qui peut le court métrage. The association employs 18 permanents, all based in Auvergne, where a whole dynamic around cinema has been created. The 2017 edition recorded more than 160,000 entries and welcomed more than 3,500 professionals.

In a country of 6.2 billion people, with the male-female ratio hopelessly skewed, repression is par for the course. Love often metamorphoses into a ‘till-death-do-us-part’ chokehold. Blood red rage is entrenched into swathes of masculinity floating about. And before one knows, the damage is done. ‘Binnu Ka Sapna’ attempts to look deep into the belly of a perpetrator and distill the agony. Binnu’s life constructs itself around building an impossible dream – recreating the ‘Love Nest’ he’s seen as an adolescent. He’s desperate to feed lovingly made cups of tea to someone. But does he know how to love? Does he even know how to listen? Or is it just lust for ‘Love’?

Binnu has sex with himself while fucking a real woman. Roaming street corners looking at seductively sold brands, his head screams trying to exorcise ghosts from stories only heard. Hatred brews for a brash, violent Father; derision bubbles for the ever-servile Mother. An uncertain anger froth at past injustices only felt, never quite understood. “The film is my attempt to understand the anger within. I went through a period where I raged and destroyed everything in my path. Irretrievably, irrevocably. Where did the roots of that anger lie? Did the anger root from a focal core or was it a constantly mutating unrecognizable beast? Its consequences and ripples, either way, rested on my individual doorstep”, he signs off.

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