Karan Johar as a charming, seductive announcer of dire directives, about the safety, security and sanctity of citizens of Schirkoa, where to be "alike is a way of life". Anurag Kashyap as a naughty drunk who is interrupted in the middle of an assignation in a bar called Sharab. And Shekhar Kapur as a reasonable sounding council member and leader of the people. There are other voices from an international star cast, including Golshifteh Farahani, Asia Argento, and Shahbaz Sarwar. In Ishan Shukla's brilliant animation film, Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust, which will premiere at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, the anomalies are citizens who are outliers, who have to be weeded out, either for their appearance or their beliefs. Seems familiar? Gwalior-born and Bhopal-raised Shukla left his engineering course at BITS Pilani to follow his passion for animation. Starting with graphics, he moved on to a short animation film, Schirkoa, before expanding it into a feature length film. Schirkoa, which refers to a dystopian universe populated by masked citizens who have numbers for names was an idea he came up with when he was nine and was already an avid story writer and illustrator. Shukla says he owes his worldview to his parents, his late father who was a theatre actor in Bhopal, and his mother, a teacher and writer. His steady diet of Russian literature made him believe the masses would change the world, though he is not so sanguine now. Spiritualism and love as a byproduct of it are the only things that may save humanity, he feels. The film, unusual for its beautifully evolved graphics, as well as for its philosophy, was possible only because of the many collaborations, including those with producer Bich-Quan Tran and with musician Sneha Khanwalkar. After some years in Singapore, Shukla now works in Baroda where he is setting up an animation studio for the Swaminarayan Mandir. Schirkoa heralds the rise of a bright star in an area that is underexplored in India. Shukla is a computer gamer as well, his desk stacked with figures from the various stories he has imbibed, from Godzilla to the faun from Pan's Labyrinth, Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings to a character from the video game Cyberpunk 2077.

Soori

An Excess of Emotion

Inside a Masked Dystopia