This year’s CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen saw the world premiere of Indian filmmaker Ankur Hooda’s feature-length debut The Calf Doll, a docudrama set in the rural life of Haryana, India. Shahran Morshed spoke with the filmmaker about the film’s origins, the influence o folk tales and how it shaped the film, and the dichotomy between the slow cinema of The Calf Doll and our fast-paced everyday lives.
SM: How did the idea for The Calf Doll first come to you? Was it a specific event, a visual image, or a deep feeling?
AH : My fascination with this idea began with a simple image that stayed with me for quite some time. One winter afternoon, I saw my grandfather sitting quietly outside, watching a neighbour’s cow with the fascination of a child. He had recently sold his own herd after a lifetime spent around cattle and farms. There was something deeply moving in that image. Farming and livestock had given shape and meaning to his days, especially after his retirement as an English Professor. But as the village changed and modernisation altered rural life, that traditional world slowly disappeared around him. The image seemed ordinary at first, yet it carried a weird scent of ennui, or existential boredom and a question that kept returning to me: what is left of us when the thing that has defined us for most of our lives is suddenly gone? Not just a profession or a livelihood, but a way of being in this world. That question became the seed of this film. The story grew from a desire to explore loss within my rural ancestral spaces, as a slow and almost invisible process.
SM : South Asian folklore and indigenous belief systems carry a distinct spiritual and temporal weight. How deeply have these traditional mythologies shaped your artistic sensibilities, and in what ways does their undercurrent inform the thematic texture of The Calf Doll?
AH : Absolutely…. I have grown up listening to my grandmother recount stories from village life that felt no different from folktales. They were filled with animals, farms, milk, seasons, rituals, omens, and strange incidents that people accepted as part of everyday realities. In those stories, the world was never entirely rational; there was often an unusual, almost magical logic connecting events. A small action could trigger an unexpected consequence, and the boundaries between the ordinary and the mysterious remained open. In Haryana, where life has historically revolved around villages, agriculture and cattle, these beliefs are deeply woven into our cultural fabric. Cattle and farms are not merely economic assets, they carry emotional, spiritual, and symbolic significance. I believe those sensibilities found their way into The Calf Doll almost subconsciously. While the film is grounded in a very real social reality, it is also shaped by the folk imagination of the landscape it inhabits. The story takes a soft turn when the old man performs the forbidden ritual following the death of the calf. From that point onward, the film begins to operate in a more dreamlike and unsettling register, where reality, memory, fear, and belief start to blur into one another. Rather than directly adapting any specific myth or folktale, I was unknowingly interested in capturing the texture of a feeling that still exists in the Haryanvi villages of my memories, a worldview where the material and the spiritual, the practical and the mythical, continue to co-exist.
SM : The film uses surrealism and is an exponent of Slow Cinema. Today, most audiences prefer fast-paced content and often reject slow or surreal movies. Yet, we still trust these artistic films to move cinema forward. What kind of impact do you hope your film has on the audience and on cinema as a whole?
AH : I think subcultures often emerge as a response to or rebellion against the dominant culture of their time, and slow cinema is no different! As our lives become increasingly fastpaced and overstimulated, there is also a growing desire to reconnect with slower, more natural rhythms of life. In that sense, the popularity of fast content among audiences doesn’t weaken slow cinema, it gives it a stronger reason to exist. This idea is also central to my ongoing academic research. My master’s dissertation explored the relationship between boredom, rural narratives, and slow cinema, and I’m interested in continuing those explorations as both a filmmaker and a scholar. I find boredom, as a concept, extremely fascinating. But honestly, I didn’t make The Calf Doll to illustrate a theory. The film moves slowly because that’s simply my svabhaav, my natural way of seeing the world and also of the space that it explores. I just can’t help it. It naturally unfolded the way I experience, or perhaps long to experience, life: quietly, attentively, and with room for imagination. That rhythm found its way into the film intuitively rather than through any conscious decision. If the film leaves audiences with anything, I hope it is a renewed sensitivity to things that are disappearing around us, their rhythms and a willingness to sit with experiences that cannot be rushed.
SM : The Calf Doll feels very poetic. What are your thoughts on poetry, and how do you connect poetry with cinema?
AH : Poetry exists in unison with realism for me. Almost as if they are married to each other! For me, realism resides in the quiet poetry of everyday existence: a gesture, a glance, a silence, a changing season, the way leaves move or trees stand. Cinema has a unique ability to capture these fleeting moments and give them emotional weight without needing to explain them. In that sense, I don’t think of poetry as something added onto reality. Rather, it is a way of seeing reality more closely. The Calf Doll emerged from that belief. The film tries to find the poetic within the lived experience of rural life, allowing emotions, images, and silences to carry meaning alongside the narrative.
SM : You chose to use non-professional actors instead of traditional industry cast. How did you approach the casting process, and why do you prefer working outside the usual film industry methods?
AH : I cannot imagine making this film any differently. The story emerges directly from the lived experiences of my grandparents, within the very spaces they have inhabited all their lives. No actor could embody them more truthfully than they could themselves, so casting them felt instinctive. Interestingly, all the fictional characters are played by professional actors : Dheeraj Kumar as Dabbu and Mukesh Bhati as the veterinary doctor. The interaction between non-professional and professional performers created a unique energy. It allowed the film to exist in a space between reality and fiction, what some might call para-fiction, where lived experience and constructed narrative constantly overlap. I also don’t think I could ever make this film, had I gone the conventional industry method route. There is a quote by Kieslowski that I strongly relate with: “The film I want to make is the film I am able to make.” Many of these unconventional choices emerged from our utter lack of resources & the compulsion/necessity that came with it. But more often than not, these limitations have led filmmakers toward forms and possibilities that a more conventional production might never be able to discover!
SM : How did you develop the visual style of the film with your cinematographer, Anish Sarai?
AH : To be honest, the visual language of the film was never something we sat down and consciously designed on set. There were very simple principles and experiments that we had discussed casually: use of foreground in compositions, frame within frames, usage of pans & tilts etc. As far as I can recall, Anish had also tried to adapt his vintage photographic Asahi Pentax 6×7 lenses over our main small Fujifilm DSLR for the dream sequences but it didn’t yield anything unique. Nothing else really. Our visual sense had been developing much earlier actually, through the way both of us naturally looked at the world. Photography has always been an important part of our lives, and Anish is a professional photographer himself. Over the years, we realized that our personal photographic work shared many of the same fascinations: the stillness of rural life, vast North Indian landscapes draped with drifting fog, solitary figures weighed down by their surroundings, soft winter light, animals resting in quiet boredom, and the silent presence of trees. Because these visual interests were already so deeply embedded in both of our instincts, they also became the unspoken foundation of our collaboration over the years of friendship. By the time we arrived on set, there was very little that needed to be verbally discussed or carefully planned. We were simply responding to the spaces around us together, intuitively building images through a shared sensibility. The images emerged naturally, guided by instincts that had been shaped through years of observing and photographing the world in similar ways. In a sense, the film was revealing a way of seeing that both of us had already been carrying within us long before we started making it. Apart from that, we were simply managing with the basic lenses that were available to us, rather than deciding anything unique in advance.
SM : Achal Mishra has been your longtime friend, and he worked as the production designer on your first feature. Can you tell us about your friendship and what it was like to collaborate with him?
AH : Achal and I had met years ago in Mumbai when I was still in college. I had invited him to my college film club to screen Gamak Ghar, a film I deeply admire. Since then, he has been like an elder brother and a gentle guiding presence in my life. We share many of the same ideas about cinema and have spent countless hours talking about the kinds of films we want to make and the ways we want to make them. When I began working on The Calf Doll, it felt completely natural for him to come on board. Officially, he worked on the production design alongside our friend Sumit Mishra, but his contribution went far beyond any single role. We shot the film using lenses, camera equipment, and other gear that he generously arranged or lent us. He would help out wherever needed, often without any distinction between departments. Sound for most of the moving shots were even recorded from his accompanying Thar. That’s what the entire collaboration felt like. Less like a formal production and more like a group of friends helping one another make a film. People simply stepped in wherever they were needed. In fact, I don’t think this film could have existed without my friends. Achal, Anish, Sumit, Dheeraj, Himang and Abhinandan, all came together and carried the film in different ways. Production design was just one small part of Achal’s contribution. His friendship and continued support have been much larger than that!
SM : Was the script for the film strictly followed word-for-word, or did you treat it like a flexible guide that allowed for spontaneous changes and improvisation on set?
AH : There was no script! The film emerged purely through observation, improvisation, and responding to life as it unfolded before us. Personally, I have always been skeptical of the idea of fixing a film completely on paper. Cinema deals with time, space, people, and images: things that are alive and constantly changing. If everything is written or predetermined, the process becomes an execution of a plan rather than a search for discovery. For me, those discoveries are at the centre of why I want to make films in the first place. In fact, I have shelved another feature in the past two days, just before shooting, because the process had become centred around a conventional screenplay-first approach due to an actor’s demands, which felt completely at odds with the way I wanted to approach cinema. I feel filmmaking gives me a license to engage with people, spaces, and ways of life that have fascinated me since childhood. Most of the film was built through improvised interactions between the actors and actual villagers within fictional situations. That openness allowed unexpected truths, observations, and realistic moments to emerge, things I could never have planned or written beforehand. The film was less about illustrating an idea and more about finding one along the way and understanding myself a little more in the process.
SM : Did you face any specific challenge during making this film that changed how you think as a filmmaker?
AH : Making this film was my film school in every sense. I was testing all my hypotheses about filmmaking in real time and discovering where they held up and where they didn’t. We were working with almost no resources, bootstrapping everything left, right and centre, which came with an immense sense of freedom honestly. But one thing I eventually learnt is that ultimately, chaos is unavoidable. I had always resisted the idea of chaos in filmmaking and imagined a sort of meditative filmmaking that can be as calm and controlled as painting or writing, but reality constantly interrupts your plans. I am yet to achieve that state, and I still feel there is a strong possibility for that kind of meditative process, with some tweaks. The biggest challenge came during editing because I had to carve a narrative from a loose collection of images, moments, and observations. After spending so much time with the footage, I kept falling out of love with it too. I kept losing all objectivity. But in hindsight, that struggle was necessary. It forced me to rethink the material, shape the film’s language more consciously, and discover possibilities that weren’t visible during shooting. I kept going back, shooting or recording dialogues and sounds to make it exciting again, for myself first of all. The dream sequences were especially difficult to crack because nothing had been pre-planned. Their form only revealed itself through a long process of trial, failure, and experimentation in the edit.
SM : Every filmmaker operates within a specific artistic lineage. Which filmmakers or visual artists have been most foundational to your cinematic journey, and do you perceive their stylistic or philosophical shadows falling across the landscape of The Calf Doll?
AH : It’s an interesting question because the responses to the film have been quite different. At CPH:DOX, the film was described as something that could not be easily placed within a specific cinematic lineage/tradition. On the other hand, a jury member at Jeonju mentioned that it reminded them of Mani Kaul and Amit Dutta. That was surprising and deeply flattering, but I wouldn’t dare place myself in their lineage! I’m still very much learning and evolving as a filmmaker. That said, many filmmakers have shaped the way I think about cinema. More than his films alone, Amit Dutta’s writings, his notes as a film student, and his idea of Janpadiya Cinema have had a profound influence on me. Gurvinder Singh’s Anhe Ghore Da Daan was perhaps the first film that I ever watched, and it truly altered my relationship with cinema and pulled me towards it at the age of 14. Kiarostami’s teachings & Nuri Ceylan’s cinema have deeply affected me as well, particularly their ability to explore emotional complexity through a contained, disciplined visual language. Tsai Ming-liang’s treatment of time continues to inspire me, and Béla Tarr’s sense of narrative drift and melancholy feels close to how stories often unfold in my own imagination. At the same time, I am increasingly interested in looking closer to home these days. Haryana has a rich cultural landscape, but none of it has found a distinct cinematic expression till now. My hope is to gradually develop a film language from its largely inexistent visual culture, emerging from that soil and those lived realities, while continuing to learn from the masters who have guided me along the way.
SM : What is your plan for your next film, and how far along is the new project?
AH : Yes, I’m currently contemplating my next feature film, which will be the second installment of a trilogy. It’s not a direct sequel to The Calf Doll, but it inhabits a similar world with familiar characters and continues my interest in ennuied people caught between disappearing worlds and emerging realities. While The Calf Doll looks at the erosion of rural life, the new film shifts its gaze towards displacement and urban loneliness while exploring carried myths and folklores in new cities. I’m interested in what happens when people leave behind their familiar rural landscapes and ways of being, only to find themselves adrift in urban spaces that promise opportunity but often produce isolation. It’s still early in the process, but it feels like a natural continuation of the questions that have occupied me for a long time: questions of belonging, cultural memory, regional identity, and the changing relationship between people and the fleeting places they call home.