Hansal Mehta Says a 40-Minute Laptop Viewing Led Him to Produce Birds in the Dark

Hansal Mehta’s route into Birds in the Dark began with a laptop in Chandigarh. In a first-person post, the filmmaker said Mauli Singh and Ankur Pathak had brought him Shashank Walia’s Punjabi feature last year; after watching its first 40 minutes on Walia’s laptop, he decided he wanted to be part of it.

That detail gives the film’s upcoming Busan International Film Festival world premiere a more personal backstory. Mehta says he and Sahil Saigal joined Reema Kaur as producers, while Kaur also edited the film. It is a compact independent-film collaboration, formed before the project reached one of Asia’s most closely watched festival stages.

From a work-in-progress to Busan

Mehta’s account is notable for its simplicity. There is no grand launch story attached to it—just an encounter with a partially seen film that, he says, left him impressed. His enthusiasm is his own assessment, but the production credits now make clear that the response developed into a formal role behind the feature.

Busan lists Birds in the Dark, also known as Hanere De Panchhi, as a world premiere. Walia, whose background is in cinematography, directs and photographs the black-and-white film. Its advertised story follows Jagtar, a police informant who takes Amir, a Kashmiri Muslim man, into custody; their journey leads towards a town where agricultural workers are organising.

The festival programme frames the film around questions of sexuality, patriarchy, caste, labour and resistance. That is useful context for Mehta’s early reaction: the project was already built around a particular visual and social terrain, rather than simply arriving at Busan as a title with a prominent producer attached.

A shared set of roles

Kaur’s dual credit is part of what makes the production arrangement distinctive. She is listed both as a producer and editor, alongside producers Mehta and Saigal, while Walia holds the director and cinematographer credits. The alignment keeps the film’s key creative and producing roles close to the work that first reached Mehta in Chandigarh.

For Punjabi independent cinema, the anecdote also preserves a recognisable truth about how backing can begin: not necessarily with a polished public launch, but with enough of a film’s voice visible for someone to commit. In this case, the first 40 minutes were enough for Mehta to join Walia and Kaur’s project.

Birds in the Dark is scheduled to screen at Busan between October 10 and 14. The festival premiere is the next public chapter; Mehta’s laptop memory explains the earlier, quieter decision that helped bring it there.

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