Director: VINOD MANKARA.
This film is a portrayal of art and artist transcending time. Adopting a ‘magical realist’ approach where reality and fantasy are mixed, the film is about humane values like love, kindness and friendship that we are fast losing in our troubled times. The nostalgia about the past appears here not as something lost but as a reminder of the power of love, with the accompaniment of music adding to its depth and poignancy. The protagonist Anoopchandran who is a writer has premonitions about death through his ESP (in a way, every artist has ESP of some sort). He resorts to writing a novel to defeat death, and what he writes and his social life are not different, but they often run into each other, unconsciously and sometimes deliberately. Many a time he confuses Gatha, his friend and lover and others about the ‘reality’ of other characters. He is also able to convince Gatha that Sathyabhama is real and even prompt her to go in search of her. Through all this, different dimensions of love –fulfilled, unrequited, yearned for… - surface in the narrative, always affirming the primacy of love. The film ends when Anoop completes his novel and confesses to Gatha about everything. When he tells her that Sathyabhama was a figment of his imagination and that it was only an occasion for them to love her, she sobs. Anoop leaves his mobile phone on top of a mountain in the Himalayas and walks away to eternity, as if death was not an end but only another beginning. Through his writing he overcomes death and breaks the shackles of time. In a way, what he gifts to his lover is a ‘never ending call’. Maybe he will return from the oblivion of death to love and comfort her again… This film is an attempt to portray the victory of art and artist over time, and to reaffirm art as a redeemer of life and love.

Director: Rajinder Singh Puller.
SMS is a simple story with strong McLuhan-ian undercurrents to it. A young girl is alone in a house that is broken into by burglars. Hiding for her life and desperate for help, her only way of communicating with the outside world is her new mobile phone; and there is only one number on it - a wrong number. Will she get help at all, and in time? How far will someone go to help someone whose identity is only a number on their mobile phone? The story subtly embodies McLuhan’s theory of technological determinism in saying that technology shapes our lives as we shaped it’s tools.