The 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival just secured one of the most anticipated Indian indies of the year. Yashasvi Juyal’s debut feature, The Ink Stained Hand & The Missing Thumb, is set to world premiere in the prestigious Proxima Competition. And it brings some serious industry muscle. Academy Award-nominated director Shaunak Sen has formally boarded the project as an executive producer. Sen specifically praised the film’s unique temporal rhythm.
Set in a remote northern toll booth town called Nagina in 2003, the narrative centers on lovers Santosh and Rajji. Following a sudden tragedy that claims Santosh’s life, he seemingly reappears at her doorstep. That setup immediately blurs the harsh reality of grief with the mechanics of the afterlife.
Juyal, a 29-year-old self-taught filmmaker and brother to actor Raghav Juyal, used his hometown of Dehradun as the thematic anchor. The production made a highly deliberate artistic choice to shoot in a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio. Why? To physically crop out the modern urban sprawl that has since swallowed the region. It perfectly recreates the isolated, rural feel of 2003 Dehradun.
The project has been quietly building momentum for months. Early development was financed by the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity in India through its Take Ten initiative. It later picked up international traction after a strong showing at the Work-in-Progress Lab of the Hong Kong International Film Festival.
But the film’s underlying anxieties about displacement are rooted in real regional history. Juyal drew direct influence from his grandfather, Anand Swaroop Sharma. Sharma was a prominent figure in the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal, the political organization that successfully fought to establish the state of Uttarakhand out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000. That raw political and geographic history bleeds directly into the haunting aesthetic of the film.