KVIFF 2026: The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb | Interview with Yashasvi Juyal​

For a debut film, director Yashasvi Juhyal is still pinching himself, still thinking it is a dream to be part of the Proxima Competition at the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, as we sit on the 4th floor of the Thermal Hotel, overlooking the picturesque Karlovy Vary on a sunny day. “I never thought the film would travel,” says Yashasvi.

Yashasvi talks freely about Dehradun, in north India, the way some people speak about a person they have lost and not quite forgiven for leaving. There is tenderness in it, and a kind of low-grade argument that never resolves. His debut feature, The Ink Stain Hand and the Missing Thumb, is built out of that same unresolved tenderness, a film about a man who dies in a highway accident, comes back from the dead as a slower, stranger, more poetic version of himself, and has exactly one goodbye left to give.

“I was just practicing filmmaking in my quiet little hometown with a group of friends, trying to tell a story.” That story turns out to be rooted in something he has been carrying since childhood: the sound of his grandfather, in his final days in 2018, remembering Karachi (Pakistan) and the upper Himalayas he crossed before the family settled in Dehradun. “He used to constantly talk about Karachi, and then the upper Himalayas, very fondly,” he recalls. Migration, for Yashasvi, was never an abstraction. It was a bedtime story that never ended.

The film’s inciting image came from something he actually witnessed. A new highway was being cut through the edges of his hometown, one of the small, sudden urban disruptions that have been reshaping Dehradun over the past two or three years, when a truck crashed into a roadside toll booth. The next day, he found a man sitting in the wrecked booth as though nothing had happened. He asked him, half-joking, if he wasn’t scared, given that a truck had just crashed into the very spot. “The man replied that he wasn’t that man,” he recalls, “that he was already dead, the ghost of that man, and that they were used to all of this.”

It is the kind of anecdote that sounds invented until you realize it’s the least invented thing in the film. For Yashasvi, the toll booth itself became a working metaphor: a space suspended in liminality, where no one truly arrives or truly leaves, where time doesn’t behave the way it does elsewhere. “That feeling of liminality is ultimately what migration is about,” he says.

The film’s setting is an old countryside outside Dehradun renamed Nagina, after a serpent garden, is drawn just as directly from memory. Nagina, he explains, was a real picnic spot from his childhood, one of many small places renamed and reshaped as administrative borders shifted. “This film is like a tribute to my childhood memories as albums,” he says, as an homage to old family photographs of picnic spots that no longer exist in the way they once did.

The film’s unhurried rhythm, long pauses, held frames, a temporality closer to breathing than to plot, makes one feel that this was a deliberate way to show the effect of a rural town. Though Yashasvi resists the word “slow,” he says, “After being exposed to world cinema, I realized this kind of temporality is neither slow nor fast, it’s a natural form of the temporality of life.” He contrasts it with his time in Mumbai (Bombay), where “days were very fast and quick,” against the “perfect boredom” of Dehradun, which he now treats as an aesthetic principle rather than a limitation. “I get feedback sometimes to move the film along. But I always feel this is the pace I want to surrender to how an old Indian rural town used to be. Slow, calm, steady.”

That contradiction — a hometown caught mid-transformation, half-built highways next to half-demolished buildings, ancient rhythms bleeding into modern ones — became, for Yashasvi, a visual gift rather than a problem to solve. “It’s a very beautiful marriage of old and new,” he adds, after a pause, “a very interesting geographic image, as a filmmaker.”

The film’s central conceit of a man returning from death, uncertain whether it has been 24 hours or 72, was inspired by something closer to reportage than metaphysics. While writing the script, Yashasvi followed news of workers trapped for over 40 days in a tunnel collapse in Uttarkashi (a place in the north of India), a recurring hazard in a region whose mountains are, as he puts it, “deeply sensitive.” He had also heard of cases where men declared dead resurfaced on the thirteenth day of Hindu funeral rites, reappearances that are, in his words, “actual real stories happening in India these days… very rural stories, not national stories.”

From there, the film allows itself to drift into the speculative: a parallel dimension, a loose flirtation with multiverse logic, an extraterrestrial framing for reincarnation that lets the director indulge some of his own childhood fascinations. “According to the actor in the film, he doesn’t care whether the earth is round or flat,” he says of the returning protagonist, Santosh, who comes back not as himself, exactly, but as a poet: slower, more deliberate, smoking cigarettes in front of the woman who once forbade it.

That woman, and her side of the story, matters more to Yashasvi than he initially lets on. “For me, it was always the girl’s perspective,” he says. The film’s central conflict, her wanting to leave, his apparent inertia, resolves only once he is, quite literally, no longer entirely of this world. “It’s about understanding each other. Human nature is about love. My two feet are different from yours, but we can still stay together and spend two moments.” When he (the character) finally leaves for good, it is with a letter, not a scene.

The choice to make the woman’s grief visibly tougher than the men was, Yashasvi adds, deeply personal rather than a corrective gesture. He tells me about his grandmother, who ran the household, fed the constant stream of lawyers and clients who passed through her barrister grandfather’s practice, and died suddenly one night of a heart condition. His grandfather, a man he had always assumed was the stronger of the two, died a month later, “absolutely fit and fine,” unable to bear the loss. “Since then I have believed women have a stronger power to bear things emotionally,” he says.

Sound does a great deal of quiet work in the film, particularly after Santosh’s death, when a low growl begins to surface on the soundtrack. It isn’t a synthesized effect. “There was this mountain lion that roars in that area, a reserved forest, also a picnic spot, where we shot,” explains Yashasvi. “It sounds like an old woman screaming. But it’s actually a mountain lion.” The recording came from his sound designer and co-writer, Ankit Thapa, whose own childhood memory of the sound shaped the film’s aural landscape; the crew spent time with the local forest department recording ambient nature sound rather than relying on a library. “Major things are recorded in the film, and not library sounds,” he says.

Birds carry their own folk logic. Crows, in the film as in the rural imagination it draws from, act as messengers of death; parrots are gossips. The director traces this partly to a piece of village folklore he had heard, a story about a man whose wife was rumoured, cruelly, to be “a snake,” which turned out to have a stranger literal echo once you actually visited the house. “These are the kind of stories we actually imagine and breathe,” he says. “Absurd and bizarre, but unique.” Whether the crow following Santosh through the film is a messenger, a coincidence, or simply Santosh himself in another form, the director is happy to leave unresolved.

Technology, notably, barely exists in the film’s world. There are no smartphones, no scrolling; the household’s television and radio flicker and cut out whenever Santosh is near, a deliberate echo, Yashasvi says, of the ambiguous ending of Kiarostami’s Close-Up, where a lapel mic famously drops out at the emotional climax. “He’s coming to say one last goodbye,” he says, “so he wants you to leave every phone, everything, and just be with him.”

Yashasvi made the film first and pitched it after, rather than developing it through the festival pitching circuits most first features rely on. It found its way to Karlovy Vary via the Hong Kong International Film and TV Market (FILMART), where a KVIFF programmer first encountered it and stayed with it through a rough cut sent in 2025 and a year of back-and-forth notes until it landed in Proxima. “It just takes one programmer to fight for a film,” he says, crediting him for bringing an Indian film to the festival, a slot he notes Indian cinema doesn’t always make.

The response from Central European audiences, he says, has surprised him most in its specificity. One group responded to the film’s science-fiction undertow. Yashasvi, who says he was “never good at science in school” but always fascinated by it, sees the film as his own oblique way of getting closer to it. A Letterboxd review from the night before our conversation stayed with him: that the film wouldn’t cater to the viewer, that it might challenge them instead, precisely the kind of friction, he says, that festivalgoers come looking for. Another kind of response arrived in the post-screening Q&A, from a woman who told him she had lost her son seven years earlier and still sometimes feels he’s a fly, somewhere nearby. “That’s one of the most beautiful responses I can sum up,” he says quietly.

Yashasvi Juhyal is already sketching his next feature, though it is still too early, he says, to describe in detail, but it will keep circling the same terrain: migration, displaced humour, and what he calls India’s particular, under-captured strain of comedy that is political, social, emotional and philosophical at the same time. Land politics, and how land itself is perceived and contested in India, will be a central thread.

As for The Ink Stain Hand and the Missing Thumb, he is hoping for a boutique, city-to-city theatrical release across India alongside further festival travel and, ideally, screenings for the Indian diaspora abroad. That, in miniature, is the whole project: a story that insists on its own local, particular ghosts, and trusts that specificity, not universality, is what makes them travel.

The 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival runs from July 3 to 11, 2026.