Independent filmmaker Shobhita Thakur’s debut fiction short, The One Who Plays (Khilawadi), has won the Best Short Film Award at the 15th Golden Bridge Istanbul Short Film Festival in Turkey and been selected for the Short Fusion Competition Programme at the 45th Cambridge Film Festival in the UK. The two developments take the film’s award tally to nine, including six major international honours, according to the filmmaker. The Cambridge Film Festival, founded in 1977, is a BAFTA-qualifying festival and one of the UK’s longest-established film festivals. Khilawadi will compete in its Short Fusion Competition Programme alongside short films from around the world. In its official selection communication, the festival’s programming committee described the film as showcasing “the talent and vision that make the world of cinema so captivating”.
The Cambridge selection follows the film’s recognition at the 22nd Kazan International Film Festival, Altyn Minbar, in Russia, where it was declared a winner. The festival’s international jury was headed by Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi. The film has also won awards at the 17th SAMA International Film Festival in Stockholm, Sweden, and the FascinAsian Film Festival in Canada, in addition to receiving recognition at festivals in India and elsewhere.
Directed by Thakur, an alumna of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, The One Who Plays (Khilawadi) explores the lives of young girls from the denotified Banchhada community of Madhya Pradesh. The film follows Sapna, a 12-year-old girl who aspires to become a doctor. Through her story, it examines questions of agency, caste, gender, education and inherited social structures, as well as the possibility of social change.
Thakur conducted extensive research with women and girls from the Banchhada community before developing the film. The narrative seeks to portray its protagonist and her circumstances with restraint, focusing on her aspirations rather than reducing her identity to the conditions into which she was born. “I wanted to tell a story rooted in a very specific social reality, but I also wanted Sapna to be seen first as a girl with an aspiration, rather than simply through the circumstances she was born into,” Shobhita said. “Seeing the film travel from Madhya Pradesh to international audiences has been deeply meaningful. The awards are an encouragement, but the larger achievement is that this story is being seen, discussed and carried across borders,” she said.
An FTII Pune alumna specialising in film editing, Thakur is a filmmaker, author and writer whose work has appeared in various publications. She has also worked as an editorial creative with Netflix India and has experience in the Mumbai film and advertising industries, where she has collaborated with filmmakers including Anurag Basu and Rajan Khosa. Her work focuses on women, caste, education and communities whose experiences remain underrepresented in mainstream cinema. With Khilawadi, Thakur brings the story of a young girl from a marginalised community in Madhya Pradesh to international film audiences.
