Fisherwoman and Tuk Tuk I Short Film I

When she discovers a pearl in the belly of a fish, a Konkani fisherwoman resigned to a mundane life of daily struggle, abandons her trade and indulges in her wildest fantasy. She buys herself a brightly colored rickshaw (“tuk tuk”) and starts to cruise at lightning speed through the winding roads of her coastal village, with her cats in tow. Finally released from her daily drudgery, ecstatic at her newly found sense of power and freedom, she is the talk of the town and her own greatest hero, when, suddenly, an accident threatens to thwart her indomitable spirit.

An exuberant, wild and joyous tale about a woman’s awakening of dormant desires, that celebrates the thrill of adventure and the triumph of dreaming big and pursuing even our most wacky, psychedelic fantasies against all odds. Soulfully told in loud color and trippy animation, the film has won India’s National Award for Animation

(- Indian Film Festival Los Angeles, 2018)

It seems like all of Suresh’s stories come from the Mumbai streetscape. The brash and burly fisherwoman that squeezed through the mad traffic jam in Worli, to get to the other side of the road, happened to walk in front of Suresh, who was already frustrated by the delay to get to a client meeting. As the narrow gap between Suresh’s car and the huge BEST bus in the front( yes, that’s what Mumbai’s bus service is called!) was too little for her to pass through, she got irritated at him for being so close to the bus. Showering him with abuses with precious animated gestures for parking so close, she gathered enough momentum to squeeze through that patch.. Eriyat, both rattled and dumbfounded, sat back and wondered if there was any possible comeback to her aggression. He wondered how effortlessly she meted out such choicest cuss words which he considered solely as a man’s license a few minutes before! She kept looking back at him to check if he dared to get back at her. But she didn’t know that he had already made a mental sketch of her. By the time he reached his studio, he had a storyline and character sketch ready!