I made a Feature Film at 24

Not because I wanted to beat Damien Chazelle, but because I couldn’t wait and I didn’t have to do it alone.

‘Making a film alone’ sounds a little like carrying a matka with no water in it.

You can do it.But what’s the point?

I didn’t fully understand that when I started. I just wanted to make something meaningful, slowly it turned out to be that…

I made a feature film at 24.I didn't feel ‘ready'. But I didn’t know how to wait for permission.

At 22, after graduating from film school, I thought I had a plan, reach out to enough people, get on enough sets, and eventually find my way into “real” filmmaking. Bigger films. Bigger worlds.

It took me more than a year and a half to even get close to a big set.

And somewhere in that waiting, I realised something about myself:

I am not built for patience.

Not in a careless way, but in a I cannot sit still while my life is happening somewhere else kind of way.

So I stopped waiting.

And I picked up my camera, started filming. My editor out it on a timeline and we saw it and said ‘Well that's something…’

Its a film that was born out of something deeply personal.

My family.

Growing up, I thought my family was complicated.Then I grew up and realised- that’s just called being a family.

When my grandfather passed away in November 2024, I started looking at my family in a way I hadn't before…

I started noticing the way grief sits in a room and no one names it.

What happens when someone is gone and how that pain becomes routine.

The way men are taught to hide it, and women are expected to live with it.

And yet, the women in my life, my mother, my grandmother, my aunt have never felt small to me.

They felt powerful because they never tried to escape pain. They carried it and lived with it.

They even taught themselves and the people around them to make space for it at the dinner table.

This film became a reflection of that.

Of them. And eventually, of me.

Somewhere along the way, something shifted in how I saw my own work.

I used to be obsessed with perfection.

Every frame had to be perfect. I thought that's what being a Cinematographer was like.

Every lens choice had to feel “correct.”No flares. No shake. No mistakes.

I was constantly trying to fix my images. Control them. Clean them up in ‘post’.

But this film didn’t let me do that.

And slowly, almost reluctantly, I started seeing something I hadn’t before:

That the most beautiful image is not the most perfect one.It’s the most honest one.

The slight shake.The flare I would have removed.The imperfections I once resisted.

They weren’t mistakes. They were actually helping me tell my story… and my truth.

And for the first time, I started falling in love with my own images not because they were flawless, but because they meant something deeply personal to me. It changed me as a Cinematographer.

I’m still not a perfect cinematographer. Or director. Or filmmaker.

But this film did something unexpected.

It made me softer with myself.

The urge to get better is still there.But the harshness is not.

And that has changed everything for me.

But more than anything, this film is not mine.

I didn’t make it alone.

There is no version of this story where I did.

It exists because of people.People who stayed.People who believed.People who gave their time, their craft, their trust to something uncertain.

I took up a job to fund it. Spent a year in Pune, closer to my family than ever.Fought with them. Left. Came back.

And in the middle of all of this, I found my people.

Old friends who held me together.New ones who walked in and decided to stay.A partner (who became the film’s editor and later, co-producer) without whom this film simply wouldn’t exist.

I learned how to talk about sound.How to listen to a film, not just see it.How to explain something I couldn’t fully articulate yet and to trust that someone else would understand.

And they did. Again and again.

I don’t know what will happen to this film.

I don’t know where it will be a year from now.I truly don’t know what comes next.

But I know this,

This matka is full to the brim now.

Because we carried it together.

And right now,

that feels like enough.

Udgam is born.