How Sleeplessness Inspired Mehar Malhotra’s Cannes Short, Shadows Of The Moonless Nights

There has long been a certain romanticism attached to the idea of the prodigal director who made great films without ever going to film school. James Cameron has gone on record saying that attending one "screws you up". Guy Ritchie, Quentin Tarantino, Anurag Kashyap, Terry Gillian.... the list goes on. 

But for FTII alumnus Mehar Malhotra, whose Punjabi-language short film, Parchaave Massiah Raatan De (Shadows Of The Moonless Nights in English), made it to Cannes' La Cinef section this year, cinema was never merely about access to equipment or technical training. It was about exposure: to people, perspectives, cultures, and ways of seeing.

“Of course, film school gives you the necessary resources in terms of budget, cameras, equipment and everything,” she says. “But along with that, it opens your eyes and hearts to new experiences, cultures, and perspectives. We (the students) were exposed to not just movies, but also people from all over the country.

"And that is the biggest resource. The students come from all walks of life, from different backgrounds, different cities, and that exposes you to a lot of new cultures. I think that is the fodder to good cinema. Because you can't be ignorant and then make great cinema."

This insistence on emotional and intellectual openness runs deeply through both her filmmaking, and her own journey into cinema. It drips through in our conversation, in the irreverence of her words when she talks reminisces her film school days, and in the excitement in her voice when she recalls how she realised that cinema was her true calling.

After all, Malhotra had initially imagined a future in investigative reporting when she studied journalism and mass communication in Delhi University. When she interned at the editorial desks in national newspapers, she believed her career trajectory had already been decided.

She would dabble in the university's theatre circuits, handing out with the performers and the film enthusiasts, watching films that her seniors would recommend.  One, in particular, stood out. 

One of the earliest films influenced her was Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, a film she had explicitly been told not to watch. A senior had handed her a hard drive filled with films and warned her to avoid one particular folder because the films inside were “too disturbing.”

Her eyes twinkle with mischief as she continues, "Of course, as a neurodivergent person, I don't listen when people tell me to not do something; I'll do that only. So I downloaded just that one folder he told me not to, and that film that was my first taste of world cinema."

A remake of the 1974 movie of the same name, The Antichrist stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a married couple who experience the accidental death of their infant son, after which they retreat to a cabin in the woods to grieve. The movie disturbed her deeply, but it also revealed a new possibility. “It changed how I viewed cinema. I felt that this is also a way of expressing grief,” she says. The 24-minute short follows a young factory worker, Rajan (Prayrak Mehta), struggling to sleep in his volatile home after working night shifts. 

Soon after, another turning point arrived during an internship at an advertising firm in Bombay. She went on a shoot and immediately felt something shift.

"Just the sense of creation made me feel so alive. I  felt it in my bones that this is where I need to be, and this is something I can do for the rest of my live and still have fun with it. It was something that I felt like I was born to do."

This feeling of being “alive” remains central to how she speaks about filmmaking even today. It eventually led her to FTII, where she immersed herself in world cinema and began developing the ideas that would later shape her diploma film, Shadows of the Moonless Nights.

The 24-minute short follows a young factory worker, Rajan (Prayrak Mehta), struggling to sleep in his volatile home after working night shifts. 

Sure, it might sound simple, but for Malhotra, sleeplessness was the entry point into something larger.

“Sleeplessness is something I thought is completely universal,” she explains. “Especially our generation, we take pride on how little we sleep. Say, I'm awake since 72 hours, and then somebody will one-up you by saying, 'I'm awake more than that, I'm awake for 76 hours.'"

“But for a huge section of the society, even something as basic as rest or sleep… it’s a luxury,” she says.

In the film, the sleepless protagonist belongs to a Punjabi family living in Maharashtra, navigating both economic hardship and cultural displacement. Rajan lives with his sister, her husband (played by Paatal Lok casting director Nikita Grover and Himanshu Kohli, respectively), their daughter and his brother-in-law's sister in a cramped room in Mumbai. 

Over time, his irregular schedule and sleeplessness starts to affect others in the family. " I wanted to show how, even in a family which is so close-knit, the cracks can start showing when something of such is happening, when the situation is tense. For example, the husband in the film starts off as somebody who's understanding, maybe somebody who has a higher moral ground, but ends up becoming a patriarch, saying things like this is my house and moralising Rajan."

The origins of the short lie partly in Malhotra's own childhood memories. Growing up in a cramped 1BHK home in Delhi, she watched her aunt work night shifts at call centres while the rhythms of everyday domestic life constantly interrupted her sleep.

“I could see that everybody in the family wants to help her out,' she continues, " but again, it was a very small house, with a Punjabi family that's loud all the time. The circumstances were like that. Say, I need to go to school, my father needs to go to the office, the house needs to be cleaned, the clothes need to be washed, and these things would wake her up.”

Over time, she watched sleeplessness slowly erode her relative’s mental and physical health.  Years later, after moving to Bombay herself, she experienced something similar firsthand. During a period of relentless work and little sleep, she remembers reaching a breaking point.

“I remember calling my mom and just crying, like, I want to go to sleep,” she says. At one point, unable to rest because of a noisy roommate, she ended up taking a nap on the staircase of her building.

These experiences gradually became the emotional foundation of Shadows of the Moonless Nights, expanding outward into questions of labour, migration, class, family structures, and survival.

Even as the film began receiving recognition, Malhotra says FTII’s culture pushed students away from obsessing over awards and validation. “Of course, we discussed these awards, and I think, somewhere in the subconscious, there is that validation that every filmmaker craves. But the professors that I had, they always told us to stay true to cinema and not chase awards,” she says.

That philosophy appears to have shaped much of the process of making the short. She returns to the collaborative energy of working with her cinematographer Diggant Surti, production designer Rashmi Kushwaha, editor Shreyas Bhopi, sound designer, recorder and mixer Sai Sanjay and music composer Sudin.  “We were just so happy that we did something,” she says. “It was such a smooth process, and it was so fun. And again, that sense of creation, that feeling alive, that was there.”

Currently, Malhotra and the team is at Cannes, where her film was screened on the Friday, May 15.

This year, Shadows Of The Moonless Nights will compete for the three La Cinef prizes, which will be awarded by the jury during a ceremony at the Bunuel Theatre on May 21. Apart from Amma Ariyan restored for filming at the Cannes Classics section, Shadows Of The Moonless Nights is the only Indian film chosen to compete at the Cannes this year.

For now, the film continues its international journey. An OTT release for the short is unlikely, but the FTII will, most probably, upload it on the institute's YouTube channel. Meanwhile, for the director of Shadows, it's been two months of sleepless nights now, promoting the film. Amidst small breaks, a new script is in the works, and if all goes well, feature film stands next.