At the 63rd National Awards this year, a young team led by 24-year-old director Varun Tandon won a Special Mention for Direction at the Awards for short film, Syaahi. The jury recognised the film for its “conglomeration of sense and sensibilities depicted through the innocence of a young mind”. When asked about the thought behind the film, Varun said he wanted to take on something simple. "I had a script in mind, and found a bunch of passionate people who believed in the idea. There was no target audience, or any such thing. It was a very personal process, and things, eventually, just fell into place. We had no idea it would win a National Award." Consequently, Syaahi is set in the hills, and tells the coming-of-age story of a young boy, his relationships, and the lessons he learns.

The felicitation ceremony was held in New Delhi on 3rd May, and the Syaahi team hopes that the win at the National Awards means that films like Syaahi, that don’t follow conventions of duration and subject, will gain popularity among a wider audience. The win could potentially have given Indian cinema its youngest ever director to win the award. "It's been tough since there are not many avenues where one can showcase a short film. But with this win, people actually want to see the film. And that's the biggest validation," says Varun.

Before Syaahi, Varun worked on Gulcharrey, a 13-minute film shot guerilla style in the torrential Mumbai monsoons on a budget of Rs. 6,000. In 2014, Gulcharrey gained popularity on YouTube gathering over 1 million views. Subsequently, Varun’s first feature film script, Anjaan Gali Gumnam Nagar, got selected for the prestigious NFDC Scriptlab and gave him the opportunity to be mentored by Ritesh Batra, writer, director of The Lunchbox.

But making a film of this scale could not have been an inexpensive affair. Varun's sister Krati was pursuing her MBA at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad when Syaahi went into pre-production. "Our previous film Gulcharrey went viral online gaining over 1 million views on YouTube in 2014 and NDTV selected the film for a prime time screening and an interview with Nagesh Kukunoor. I was a student at ISB during this time and organised a screening followed by a talk about our experiences in film making, the art and, given it was a business school talk, its business. The event generated a lot of excitement a lot of buzz on campus. So when the script for Syaahi was finalised later in the year, I reached out to interested students with the opportunity to co-produce it with us."