Bearlike Man
A grizzly bear possessed mother gives birth to a boy with a rare disease - The Bearlike Syndrome and gets him married to a 12-year-old virgin to cure him on the advice of the local witch.
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Sapna Moti BhavnaniWriterSindhustan, My Dog Is Sick
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Sapna Moti BhavnaniDirectorSindhustan, My Dog Is Sick
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Wench FilmsProducerMy Dog Is Sick
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Project Type:Treatment
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Genres:Horror, Fantasy, Body Horror, Psychological Horror, Gore
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Number of Pages:10
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Country of Origin:India
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First-time Screenwriter:No
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Student Project:No
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NAFF BIFANBucheon
July 8, 2021
Official Selection
As a pioneer entrepreneur, Sapna Moti Bhavnani founded the hair salon Mad O Wot 16 years ago in Bombay, India. Through her versatile avatars such as writing a bitingly intimate weekly column for Mumbai Mirror and Mid-Day, authoring a self-help book for teenage girls Style O Wot, launching the avant-garde clothing line SoFake, to producing One Billion Rising at Carter Road (2013), acting in award-winning plays like NIRBHAYA – a searing testimonial play which won the Amnesty Freedom of Expression Award, The Fringe First Award and The Angel Herald Award in 2013 for cracking open the cone of silence around sexual and gender-based violence in India to JATINGA in 2017 –inspired by Kamathipura and highlights human trafficking worldwide; she traverses mainstream success with just as much ease as she skirts the underground youth art and culture movement.
Lately Sapna has been using filmmaking to give her activism a new voice. She is best known as Producer/Director of her award winning documentary Sindhustan. Sindhustan has won 12 Awards and travelled to 23 festivals and is now streaming online on MovieSaints.
Actor, spoken word artist, hair stylist, writer, director, producer - Sapna embodies it all as a visionary and a change maker. In July 2020 she launched her production company called Wench Films to promote female talent from India to the world and keeping that philosophy in mind also launched a successful Edition 1 of Wench Film Festival in March 2021 introducing 81 new women talent to the world. She has just completed her feature My Dog IS Sick which had its debut at the prestigious Visions Du Reel Film Market in April 2021 and had its World Premiere in August 2021 at the Prestigious New Horizons International Film Festival in Poland. The story for her next feature Bearlike Man was an Official Selection at BIFAN making her the first Indian woman director to ever be selected at the market. She is currently editing her horror short Cataclysm, developing a VR series I Did Not Scream and writing a book - Chapter One for Harper Collins.
The rest, like they say is herstory.
It is a mad time to be alive. Like most, I also started consuming the net for stories - rummaging through newspaper clippings, news portals, the dark net; looking for anything that would satisfy my creative desperation.
A few weeks in, I came across a story of a woman (now 55) who was married to man with Hypertrichosis (also known as the Werewolf syndrome) at the age of 12. The husband died early in the marriage leaving her behind with 6 daughters, 3 of whom also carried the syndrome. Recently one of the daughters gave birth to a son also infected with the syndrome and was kicked out of her husband’s home.
I tracked them down to the outskirts of a small village in Maharashtra, India. After speaking to one of the daughters at length I came to know the details of her mother’s trauma that still affected the whole family. Her mom was so terrified when she saw her husband’s werewolf face for the first time on their wedding night that she lost her power of speech. It has taken many years for her to speak a few words.
Her silence gave me a voice.