Short Stream | Betelgeuse by Sunder Konar: In pursuit of the bright star
Sunder Konar’s Betelgeuse is a classic guerrilla project. It makes the compelling point that life offers a way out of grief and anger in unexpected ways
Sunder Konar, the 27-year-old director of Betelgeuse, was a professional boxer who represented his home state Maharashtra in various national competitions.
From the boxing arena to film sets, his journey is a classic Mumbai story. He worked small jobs from an early age to take care of his mother while pursuing his two passions, boxing and films.
“I didn’t watch a lot of films growing up, because I just didn’t have the time, but I knew I had stories in me and it was the medium I gravitated to,” Konar tells me after a private screening of his second short film Betelgeuse, made after the Covid pandemic, which travels to the Chicago South Asian Film Festival this month (September 17 to 22) to compete at the Best Shorts category.
Betelgeuse is a hearty, sentient film which celebrates the eternally popular idea that the way out of adversity often appears in unexpected, simple places and encounters. The language of Konar, who has been an assistant to Bollywood directors in films such as Dream Girl, Toofan and Radhe Shyam, doesn’t have loud, melodramatic tropes even when the protagonist Chitra (Gayatri Datar) is headlong in a mental and emotionally fragile state. And that treatment works in its favour—communicating the message of writers Lokesh Singh and Mayur Hardas without much fuss.
Betelgeuse is the brightest star in the constellation Orion. It marks the eastern shoulder of the hunter and is known for its luminosity. It derives energy from other stars in order to survive. The story of the film then is a journey to the point when Chitra finds her Betelgeuse.
Chitra, a passionate astronomer, loses an opportunity to fulfil her life’s only ambition when she meets with a debilitating accident. Her dreams shatter, and she retreats into a depressive cocoon. When her brother Ankit (Ankit Nayar) offers a chance for the two of them to bond over a road trip to the breathtaking landscapes of Spiti Valley in Himachal Pradesh, Chitra meets her catalyst. She must go through this journey and open her heart to her catalyst to meet her Betelgeuse.
Told in a linear narrative, with competent cinematography by Mayur Hardas—the film’s lean team had many different jobs on the set, with Konar also working as the sound technician and writer Lokesh Singh playing an important role in it. “I had limited resources, limited budget. The script was rejected several times, and I had the thought of just abandoning it, but I knew this was a film I wanted to make because it had a personal meaning for me and deep down, I have always wanted to be a storyteller who can help people in some small way, beyond just entertaining. So, I capitalised on the momentum, got my friends together and with their support we finished it,” Konar said.
A real-life story inspired the film. Exactly as in the film, Konar knew a girl whose ambitions were shattered by an accident, she did not get enough emotional or psychological support and died by suicide. “I wanted to turn her story around and make her survive in the film. The message is, what made her survive,” he added.
In the film, Chitra gets suicidal and is in a state of almost no return. Ankit’s quiet desperation is a foil to her emotional stasis. Will the trip to Lahaul and Spiti, its expansive beauty, an encounter with an aurally challenged boy who plays the ukulele, and a paraglider’s zest for life, resuscitate Chitra back to life?
Betelgeuse was screened at the Kolkata International Film Festival in 2023. It has travelled to various other festivals in the past year, including the DC South Asian Film Festival, Washington DC, Indian Film Festival Stuttgart, and the Mumbai International Film Festival where it fetched the Best Debut Director in the Short Film category.
“I want to make more movies like this one — where there is something that my audience takes back with them,” Konar said. His first short film was Gubara (2013), about a young balloon seller in Mumbai and he is shopping his next screenplay, a feature film titled Rubaroo. Konar says it is a feel-good drama set in Mumbai, in which three characters from disparate backgrounds intersect and transform each other because of an experience common to all three of them: serial discrimination based on their situations or circumstances of their birth.
Short Stream is a monthly curated section, in which we present an Indian film that hasn’t been seen before or not widely seen before but is making the right buzz in the film industry and film festival circles. We stream the film for a month on HT Premium, the subscription-only section on hindustantimes.com.
Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and film critic. Write to her at Sanjukta.sharma@gmail.com
Producers: Ramkumar Hardas and Mayur Hardas
Writer and Director: Sunder Konar
Budget: ₹10 lakh
Running time: 23 minutes 24 seconds
Language: Hindi
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