“Different Danny” BY Amshu Chukki

2023 · IN · EN/EN · 16’ · In competition

The film follows a stunt director by the name ‘Different Danny’ in Kannada films in the background of the city of Bangalore. Danny – the protagonist of film – describes a walk along a stream and through a thicket that eventually opens up to a waterfall. In a moment of hesitation and confusion, Danny jumps off the cliff for a shot. A sense of duty is tied to this act (although it might of be applauded as an act of courage). The film industry employs thousands, each hailing from across diverse social backgrounds and skill sets, re-classifying them to uphold a system of hierarchies tied into notions such as respect and duty. With the complete closure of filming due to the pandemic, not being able to perform this duty left Danny in a state of anxiety. Here, a third kind of suspended time takes over. Recollections and choreographies for the future become devices to navigate and contend with this new time. It captures, on one hand, the atmosphere and apparatus of cinema: men handling equipment, cameras, rain curtains, tarp, and lights. On the other, it captures the city in a state of interruption.

THE DIRECTOR | AMSHU CHUKKI

Amshu Chukki is a multidisciplinary artist primarily exploring video/film based in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, India. In his work, experimental video and images become a way of imagining new worlds. Chukki’s practice is site-informed and is an ongoing exploration of new ways of articulating ideas of landscape and cities through speculative fiction, cinematic excess, poetry, music, and geology in the context of rising political intolerance and environmental issues that emerge from the site. 

Using the recce as a narrative device, these potential films dwell on the visible and not-so-visible interconnections between life, infrastructure, cinema, and urbanity, in the context of socio-political histories and the contemporary moment. His practice attempts to examine the re-imagination of image, sound, cinematic production, public space, politics, urban planning, and the role of the landscape through various protagonists that take from the site. In Chukki’s work, the landscape becomes a site for exercise that brings together multiple communities and their idiosyncrasies, where it initiates conversation from localized micro contexts to talk from a specific place. My experimental films spill out into drawings and sculptures that attempt to stage the city and landscape as a protagonist and challenge normative modes of a docu-fiction lens.