Magic gone wild

In the 36-year-old filmmaker's latest feature, Jugnuma: The Fable, lost fairies wreak havoc, fires rage, and memories falter. Drawing from his own experience with a forest fire in Uttarakhand, he asks: Can the smallest spark have the most profound consequences? 'I feel in love with the potential to build a cinematic world that doesn't exist anywhere but in the movie that creates it,' he says

- Karishma Upadhyay

Magic is woven into the everyday, in Jugnuma: The Fable. Each strange twist also hints at a hidden truth. What if fairy tales were true? How would the dark realities of such an unpredictable world unfold? Exploitation, violence and malevolence shape-shift, asking: Did you just see what you think you saw?

Lines blur. Fires burn. Memory becomes more uncertain than myth.

Fairies may be wreaking havoc, stuck in the wrong dimension.

"I wanted to tell a story that was driven by poetic suspense," says Raam Reddy, 36.

Set in 1989, his film builds itself around Dev (Manoj Bajpayee), who owns a large apple orchard in the Himalayan foothills. He inherits a picture-perfect world. Then his trees start to burn. At first, a few mysteriously catch fire; then large swathes go up in flames.

Old fault lines resurface. Are the village labourers angry with me, he asks.

They point to a group of nomads. These people have been around since it was just them and the mountains; long before civilisation, they say. Who knows what they're capable of?

Shot by Sunil Borkar on 16mm film, Jugnuma contains moments of gobsmacking beauty: the raging fire; shimmering fireflies. In an opening sequence that is startlingly unusual, Dev straps on giant mechanical wings and leaps off the edge of the estate. He will do this over and over, as he watches over his apple trees, and later watches them burn.