He bought a camera on Ebay for $6000, shot his film, sold the camera in India and bought monitors for post-production with the money. Meet India?s Gen-Y film-maker Anup Kurian (picture below) whose directorial debut Manasarovar (Neha Dubey in a film still above) is one of the two feature films from India (the other one being Rituparno Ghosh?s Raincoat) to be selected for the London Film Festival. It is also the opening film in the Indian Panorama at the International Film Festival of India in Goa.

Anup left for the US to do an e-commerce job in 1999 after his diploma in TV and film production from FTII, Pune. ?While I always wanted to make films, I also wanted to see the world and my post-graduation in computer science helped me get a job in the US. But it was always a matter of time before I made a film. From 2002, I seriously started writing scripts.?

It took Anup just two months in 2003 to script Manasarovar. ?It happened so fast that I started questioning myself whether someone can actually write a good script in two months in a simple word processing software. But it turned out well with a whole lot of real-life characters and experiences. It was a love story all right but my friends and family loved the novelty in the plot.?

As for the cast and crew, Anup always knew whom to rope in. ?Our entire batch of ?99 got behind the camera. So everyone from the cameraman to the sound guy to the editor is making his debut. For the cast, I had to take Atul Kulkarni in the lead as I felt he could relate to the character with his Maharashtrian roots. For the female lead, I wanted to take someone quite opposite to Atul and hence Neha Dubey. With the two I could encapsulate the entire youth of India.?

Made with a shoe-string budget of Rs 25 lakh, Manasarovar does boast of some great music. ?While the theme and two other tracks have been composed by the Irish band Random, the background score has been done by two American students. The way we have used technology is quite unique. They used to upload the music there in the US and we used to download it here, send our suggestions through email and then they would make necessary changes,? said Anup.

The film, which will have its international premiere on October 31, has already bagged the prestigious Aravindan Puraskaram (Adoor Gopalakrishnan was head of the jury) and Gollapudi Srinivas Award (Kamal Haasan was the jury head) for best debut director. ?The film should get a commercial release in December and no, it is not an art film just because it is travelling the festivals,? Anup signed off.