London: Chilean-Indian writer-director Shalini Adnani's film ‘Our Share of Sand’ is in competition for the prestigious Sutherland Award for the First Feature at the British Film Institute (BFI) London Film Festival, starting next week.
Adnani's movie, a UK-India-Greece co-production shot in Mahabaleshwar and Jambhali villages in Maharashtra, will compete for the award which annually honours the most original and imaginative directorial debut.
The coming-of-age drama taps into the Adnani's childhood summer holidays spent in India as it explores family loyalty, class inequality, child labour and the devastating human and environmental cost of illegal sand mining.
"I think moving between cultures gives the film one of its central philosophical conflicts: the tension between a western perspective and a local one, and what each can see or fail to see," Adnani told PTI.
"I've experienced stepping deeply into Indian culture and society, and then stepping outside it again. That movement has given me both a sense of connection and a certain distance. It gave me the ability to question both spaces, including the assumptions I bring with me," she added.
According to London-based filmmaker, there's something complicated about returning to a place "you belong to".
"You can recognise things that people within that society have come to accept, but you can also arrive with judgments that don't fully account for the realities they're living with. I was interested in that tension," she said.
Her first feature, which had its world premiere in Venice and is currently doing the film festival rounds, is told through the gaze of 12-year-old Maya, played by actor Maya Mehta.
Acclaimed Indian actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub and British actress Ellora Torchia portray her conflicted parents as they navigate a complex social landscape.
"I wanted to explore this time frame because I knew that from the ages of 11-13 is when children develop their sense of morality and develop quite binary thinking around what is right and wrong. So, staying true to that experience from Maya's gaze was the most accurate way to represent that new moral development," Adnani explained.
As someone born and raised in a Sindhi family in Chile, South America, the writer-director said her relationship with her Indian heritage has always been shaped by displacement and the stories passed down through generations.
"I grew up hearing about Partition, about my family losing everything and having to rebuild their lives elsewhere. Those stories made questions of inheritance very present for me: what survives displacement, what we carry with us, and what we pass on to our children," she reflected.
That family history found its way into her film's relationship with wealth as a desire to protect what a family has built, and the difficulty of questioning it when it is tied to earlier experiences of loss.
"The diamonds and jewellery in the film come quite directly from that history. I heard stories about jewellery becoming a safety net for the family as they resettled ', something portable that could help them start again. So those objects carry an emotional weight for me, bound up with survival, security and family memory.
"I was interested in how that legacy travels across generations, and how a younger generation begins to reckon with what it has inherited," she said.
Adnani's short film ‘White Ant’ premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and led her to be named a Screen International Star of Tomorrow in 2025.
Now her first feature film is also in contention for an award after it is screened at the BFI London Film Festival next weekend, before hitting cinemas in India some time next year.