Private Project

AN ODE TO BLACK ANTS

About the film

The film is a fantasy satire drama that looks at contemporary life and the need of each of us to express our identity. The narrative of the film quests for the past. The past is memoirs, the history of places, the chronology of events, and a mystery of previous births. Two dreams are plotted against the backdrop of the Kutch rural area of Gujarat and Tejghat, predominantly an Adivasi ( Indigenous) inhabitant. These two landscapes and life are very peculiar in their appearance.

Story
A multi-cultural theatre group is on the verge of its breaking point. Among whom, two actors bond over unusually similar dreams about previous birth. These dreams may hold the key to solving the differences within the group. The narrative is, in essence, different views and interpretations of these two other dreams by the theatre group members.

After an unpleasant nightmare, Sita, twenty-seven years old of Adivasi origin, organizes an informal gathering of theatre members at Iqbal’s place in Sidhpur, a town with abandoned Bungalows. Mr Iqbal is around fifty years of age. He is one of the founder members of the theatre group who is bedridden after a brain haemorrhage; Iqbal can understand everything around him but is unable to respond because he is completely paralyzed. he lives completely locked inside his body.

In the gathering, Kabir, a thirty-five-year-old actor from a weaver community, starts telling others about his dream to relieve the tension among the members. The dream was about who he was at his previous birth. He was a Bhavai artist who played a female character (a popular folk theatre form in rural Gujarat. In this art form, female characters are played mainly by males). He became blind in an accident.

Subsequently, Sita tells everyone she has a somewhat similar recurring dream. In her last birth, she was Kabir’s wife, one of the Bhavai players. He loses his audible senses for a while. All the elements of sound become pure imaginary for him.

  • Biju Kurup
    Director
    https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3044983/?ref_=fn_all_nme_1
  • Biju Kurup
    Writer
    https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3044983/?ref_=fn_all_nme_1
  • Ujwala Mahale
    Producer
    https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3044983/?ref_=fn_all_nme_1
  • storytellers combine
    Producer
  • Pratik Rathod
    Key Cast
  • Pooja Purohit
    Key Cast
  • Garima Bharadwaj
    Key Cast
  • Ravi Ranjan
    Key Cast
  • Nilesh Brahmbhatt
    Key Cast
  • Rahul Deep
    Cinematographer
    https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5726640/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_0_nm_8_in_0_q_rahul%2520deep
  • Issac Newton
    Sound Editor
  • Allen Thomas
    Co Producer
    https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6303682/?ref_=tt_ov_dr_1
  • Biju kurup
    Editor
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    KALI KIDIYO NA DUVE CHANDE
  • Project Type:
    Feature
  • Genres:
    Drama, Fantasy, Satire
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 47 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    November 20, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    175,527 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada, India
  • Country of Filming:
    India
  • Language:
    Gujarati
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital, 4K, Sony
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.39
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Biju Kurup

Biju Kurup is an alumnus of the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University –Baroda, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1998 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2000 with a specialisation in Art History—successively joined the Film and Television Institute of India (F.T.I.I) in 2003 to study for a three-year Post Graduate Diploma in Film Editing. After completing the Film Editing course, he instigated his career as an independent feature Film Editor. So far, he has edited twelve feature films in various languages, such as Malayalam, Hindi, English, Marathi, Gujarati and Arabic. Both as an editor and maker, he has extensively worked on all genres and forms of cinema. There are more than seventy documentaries commissioned by various agencies and broadcasting companies, more than thirty Advertisement Films, and he worked as a creative editor and storyboard consultant for animation. He has also written four feature film scripts, which are in various stages of pre-production.
Immediately after completing his master’s degree in art history, he taught Visual Art and Art History at various Universities and colleges and, in the intervening time, conducted remarkable workshops on visual art and Cinema with school students, Drama students and various youth and women's organisations. Ventured into Video Art, Installation Art and Performance Art, made an innovative independent body of works and associated with a few other Artists in this creative arena of expression.

From 2014 to 2018,he worked as an Associate Professor for the Edit and Sound Department at L.V.Prasad Film & T.V Institute, and from 2018 to 2021, worked in the School of Film & T.V at M.I.T-A.D.T University Pune as an Associate Professor for Edit &V.F.X.during the same period he was a member in Board of Studies and syllabus committee. He has designed new courses, built infrastructure, and developed various Curricula for both Undergraduate and postgraduate levels. In 2021, he joined the National Institute of Design -Ahmedabad, an Institute of National Importance, as a Senior Associate Faculty. His current area of interest is Transmedia and Interactive Storytelling.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Ants and humans share a quiet kinship in hardship: both build, struggle, and adapt, sustaining life through resilience and cooperation. Black ants move through dust and debris as people move through time—unnoticed, burdened, yet bound together by the necessity to continue.

AN ODE TO BLACK ANTS is both a tribute and a question: to the invisible labours of art and memory, to the resilience of those who endure in silence. and to the lives—past and present—that march quietly within us. This is an archaeology of memoirs of images and sound, which are forgotten for a while, to just recollect personal memoirs.

The title’s metaphor is deliberate. Ants are small yet collective, silent yet relentless; they carry burdens far beyond their size, as we carry fragments of older lives, traditions, and dreams. Unlike ants, the theatre troupe struggles to act as one, forgetting that interdependence is a strength. Iqbal’s voiceless endurance, Kabir’s imagined soundscapes, and Sita’s searching spirit mirror her identity as an image of a representative of an ethnic community.

The film is shot against various kinds of landscapes of Gujarat in the western part of India, unique historical places with fourteenth-century historical monuments, Architectural relics of Sidhpur, rural villages, and the old city area of Ahmedabad, a city in Gujarat that was declared a heritage city in India. Reality bleeds into dream; present bodies host earlier selves. At its heart lies Bhavai—travelling theatre of satire, which shapes not only the narrative but the film’s architecture: multi-voiced, nonlinear, and open to interruption.

Sound and silence are dramaturgy here. For Kabir, sound becomes memory; for Iqbal, speech is impossible. What remains is the hum of identity itself—carried, like the ants, in quiet procession.