Short Stream | Watch ‘Shera’, a short film about two adventurous boys who set out to fulfil a small, wild dream
The film is an ode to Kumaon’s gritty residents, leopards included. Migration threatens to end a friendship, the wild helps to cement it in Arun Fulara’s short
Shera, an independent short film that was released earlier this year at Plein la Bobine, a children's film festival in France, has a running time of just a little over 19 minutes, but Arun Fulara's skillful storytelling sublimates it into something more than its eponymous leopard meandering through Kumaoni forests.
Shera is, at its heart, a film about migration, the loneliness of our imaginations, and the fragility of what we call home. In the post-pandemic world, these ideas are more relevant than ever. The film has travelled to nearly 20 festivals, including the LA Shorts International Film Festival, the Bengaluru International Short Film Festival, the Chicago International Children's Film Festival and the London India Film Festival since March.
The film situates the story of two boys, Monu and Raju (played by Sagar Kumar and Parth Pandey, respectively, both first-time actors from Almora) aged around 12, living in a village in the Kumaon hills of Uttarakhand, waiting for a glimpse of a leopard named Shera. One of the boys is moving to the city because his family wants better prospects. So, Shera is as much a film about leaving as it is about catching sight of an elusive creature.
Writer-director Fulara (41) only touches upon the classic mystifier and placebo that locals often tell tourists who don’t spot a tiger at a tiger sanctuary: “You can’t see the leopard but the leopard sees you!” There’s even a leopard point-of-view shot or two. After a gentle, sparse but beautifully shot establishing sequence, we wait for this: Do the friends get to spot Shera before they part ways from each other? Will they have one last adventure in the wild?
The film was made on a budget of around ₹13 lakh. Fulara and his small crew of 12 people filmed in the village of Mayoun, near the temple town of Bageshwar, in Uttarakhand. Producers Sharib Khan and Vikas Kumar, whose short, Sonsi (Shadow Bird) won the National Award for best non-feature film cinematography in 2021, got on board with Fulara’s film at the very start.
Watch the film trailer here
“We shot over a week with a cast of locals. Barring the actors who play the mother and father, everyone is a local who’s acting for the first time in the film,” Fulara said.
After a showing at the Dharamshala International Film Festival in November, Fulara and his team took the film to village government schools across the state of Uttarakhand.
“Looking at the children in these rural schools in Kumaon watch our film and giggle, smile, and laugh has been precious to me. Their questions mostly about the leopard and their observations on wildlife and living are almost always on point."
Shera has a personal resonance for Fulara, whose parents grew up in a village near Bageshwar, Uttarakhand. Fulara, a Mumbai resident, left a corporate career to pursue filmmaking in 2012. It emerged from the director’s fascination for leopards — something he attributes to his childhood.
“My family comes from a small village up in the hills of Kumaon and we’ve taken a trip once every year or so to the hills for our vacations. On those vacations, I would end up hearing story after story of the leopard (or leopards, for there must’ve been many over the years) that lived in the caves near our family home. I, of course, never saw the leopard, and therefore assumed that the village elders, all of them master storytellers, were obviously taking a city kid like me for a ride,” Fulara explained. Each year he visited, his desire to see the leopard increased, as did his fascination for the beast.
Fulara's parents migrated to Mumbai while they were in their 20s, “much like Monu does in the film, and like thousands of Kumaonis do every year. If they hadn't migrated before I was born but after, it would be my story too, as it is the story of so many of my cousins,” Fulara said.
The setting, and the way cinematographer Rangoli Agarwal captures the landscape — especially the closing sequence, when we see a sturdy jeep overpacked with those bound for the city zig-zag its way through the mountain terrain — is viscerally more about loss than it is about new beginnings.
Fulara’s short comes at the heels of two other engaging short films—Sunday (available on YouTube) and My Mother’s Girlfriend (available to stream on MUBI). He is at work on two feature films, one, tentatively titled My Home is in the Hills—Shera is a spin-off narrative from this script—and, the other, Kyaap, set again in the mountains, and in his words, “a father-son story tinged with magical realism”. Fulara isn’t going to abandon the personal narrative anytime soon.
He began his filmmaking career assisting writer-director Devashish Makhija, whose three feature films, Oonga, Ajji and Bhonsle, effectively combine phantasmagoria with gritty realistic depictions of diminished, disparaged Indian characters. Fulara says, the gift from working with Makhija is the realisation that he can’t shy away from making his work personal.
“To let yourself be seen in your art. It’s something I am much more conscious of in my work now and that’s where all the gold is,” Fulara said.
Shera will be available for viewing till January 15. Short Stream, curated by film journalist Sanjukta Sharma, will present an independent short film that is making a buzz in film festivals. The film will be available only for a month in Hindustan Times' subscription-only section HT Premium.
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