Calcutta boy Aditya Vikram Sengupta is a winner in Venice. The 71st edition of the Venice Film Festival ended on Saturday with Aditya’s Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love) claiming the Fedeora Award for best director of a debut film.

The non-dialogue film is about a young married couple (Ritwick Chakraborty and Basabdutta Chatterjee) working on opposite sides of the clock and sustaining their life and love in recession-hit Bengal.

Aditya — 31 and a student of St. Xavier’s Collegiate School in Calcutta and NID, Ahmedabad — was in good company with the other Fedeora award (Best Film) going to Korea’s Kim Ki-duk for One on One.

“All the films that go to Venice Film Festival are backed by a strong sales, distribution and PR machinery. What the festival found most credible about our film was that it was a cold entry with no such backing and the amount we had spent on the film is what a film would spend on the publicity and sales machinery alone,” said Aditya, who made an appearance in dhuti-panjabi-chador (in picture) at a full-house screening of his film. After a “standing ovation and a round of questions and answers”, it was an “overwhelming” moment for Aditya when the awards were declared on Saturday. “Ours was such a random film with no backing that we went with very little expectations.... This award comes as a great encouragement and tells me that I’m on the right path. It also makes me anxious about my journey,” said Aditya.

The journey being to the BFI London Film Festival followed by the Busan International Film Festival where Asha Jaoar Majhe, shot in Kurseong and Calcutta partly by Mahendra Shetty (DoP for Lootera and Udaan) and partly by Aditya himself, is headed next.

In London it will be the only Indian film competing for best first feature (Sutherland Award) while at Busan Asha Jaoar Majhe is one of the six Indian films to be showcased in the section “A window to Asian Cinema” alongside the likes of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider and Homi Adajania’s Finding Fanny.