At 6.30 am, the light carries a cool blue cast. A child awakes to hushed voices and a house where the usual rhythm has cracked. He does not brush his teeth. Years later, that small disruption becomes the way he remembers the day.
That Day I Did Not Brush, a Huggaheim Pictures original written and directed by Priya Sridhar, unfolds entirely through a child’s gaze. “It is clearly a child’s contemplation. These are emotions that may not register fully at the moment they happen. Even as children, we experience events without understanding them completely,” shares Priya.
The idea was drawn from her own memory. She recalls attending her grandfather’s funeral at around eight or ten years of age. “I knew he was no more, yet I was playing with my cousins.” The film works in retrospect. The boy marks the day not by what he understood, but by what broke from routine.
The film, which was released recently on YouTube, was the official selection for Beijing Liftoff 2025 and also a finalist for the New York International Film Awards 2025 and Jaipur International Film Festival 2026. The journalist-turned-filmmaker followed the story and every creative choice, including the typography, through the child’s perspective. When he wakes, he senses gloom. “That is why the film begins in a cool blue tone. Something feels unusual. People are around, but something lingers in the air,” she shares. Priya and cinematographer VS Prabanchan set the opening at that specific morning hour, when natural light holds its blue cast. As sunlight enters around 8 am, the tone turns warm. “Children have fleeting emotions. One moment, they are confused; the next, they want to play. The warmth reflects both the time of day and his emotional movement,” she points out.
The camera stays with the boy. Adult faces do not dominate the frame. “The entire film observes grief from a child’s perspective. We only see what he feels,” says Priya.
Casting for the kid’s role was instinctive for Priya, who chose Aadhvik Karthikeyan from the audition. “I knew I wanted Aadhvik because of his innocence. Many child actors today perform with an adult tone. I did not want that,” she says. Priya did not narrate the full script to the children on set. “I was clear that I did not want to introduce grief in a heavy way,” she says. Instead of explaining the story, she offered possibilities. “What if we have one life in the morning and another while we sleep? What if we return each time we wake up? I filled him with curiosity. I told him to hold that question in every frame. He should look for answers in how people walk, in his grandmother’s face, in everything. He carried it and was very perceptive,” she shares. On the day of the shoot, she asked Aadhvik what he was curious about. He said he wanted to ask God why he was born. “I was taken aback. That was such a profound question,” she says.
A larger vision
Priya founded Huggaheim Pictures to build what she calls a storytelling brand. “I would not call it a conventional production house because I do not intend to take commercial projects like corporate videos or ads unless they resonate with my themes.” She is drawn to human emotions, especially those that are subtle and often unnoticed. The name of the company came from a personal moment. “I was watching something and I started crying. It was not a sad cry. It felt like a good cry,” says Priya. She felt held by the story. She adapted ‘Hygge’, the Scandinavian word for warmth, into ‘Hugga’, and paired it with ‘heim’, meaning home. She explains, “So ‘Huggaheim’ means a home that feels like a hug, or stories from a home that feel like a hug.”
Under Huggaheim, she is developing Haiku Kathaigal, 17 small stories shaped like visual haikus. “When you impose restrictions, you innovate. Something new emerges from that limitation,” she adds. Priya did not initially plan this project. During a screenwriting programme in New York, after screening this film, her professors told her that if she was committed to the idea, she should complete all seventeen. “Only then would it feel like a complete loop,” she notes. Around six scripts are ready, and the rest are in progress.
That Day I Did Not Brush was shot in a single day in her apartment building, at a neighbour’s home. “Execution is always where people falter. We had to finish within a specific time frame and do justice to the film while staying economical,” she says. A few people put money in because they believed in what she was making. Priya adds, “This entire project exists because of kind people around me.”
At the end of the film, illustrations appear, made with animator Ashiv Tatolu in a style drawn from Japanese brushwork. Some hint at stories she plans to tell. Some are simply small moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed. “These films are about details we usually overlook,” she says. That is the logic the whole project runs on.
Like Priya found a home in the movies she watched, she wants to bring that to people around her through Haiku Kathaigal.