Sometimes, dreams do come true. It was one such instance for up-and-coming filmmaker Uday Brahma, whose Kannada short film Eater Eaten, a surreal body horror, presented by Puneeth Rajkumar Audio, has been quietly unsettling viewers and recently caught the attention of filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who was in the city for the Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFes). Kashyap, after watching the short film, shared a promotional post about it, bringing national attention to Brahma’s work.
Recalling the moment they met, the visual artist says, “Kashyap was in Bengaluru and as soon as we (the movie team) got to know about it, we visited him at a shooting location in the city. While he was returning after the shoot, we requested him to take a look at our work. After watching it, he called me to his caravan, and said, ‘Wow, how did you guys make this piece? It’s so fresh.’”
According to him, to see Kashyap getting struck by the film’s visual language alongside the acknowledgement was nothing short of a surreal surprise. “He told me every frame feels like a painting. He called it absurd in a good way and offered to share it with other filmmakers,” Brahma told CE.
The film Eater Eaten is rooted in philosophy, dreams and the subconscious. “I have lucid dreams and I maintain a journal which has thousands of write-ups on my subconscious, precognitive states and visions. It has taken me more than eight years,” Brahma shares.
The film draws inspiration from an Upanishadic idea about cyclical existence. “No matter what we eat today, we become the eaten at the end,” he explains. Shot entirely in 24 hours, the film deliberately avoids conventional storytelling with the intent to give the audience a space to think and come up with their own theories . “If I shot something on the lines of love with commercial elements, the audience would not accept it. So, I used a lot of imagery with life-cycle philosophical messages. Just like a painting, people can interpret it in their own ways.”
So when someone watches the film, he hopes they perceive a dreamlike experience. Influenced by the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic theories, the film also uses elements of hypnosis.
“This short film is only to show the production aspect. Every day I explore my dreams and nightmares, I take one fragment, develop it through active imagination in the morning and then take action on it,” he says.