Aman Wadhan
Directing
Biography
Aman Wadhan is a filmmaker, educator, and artistic researcher. He holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Film Direction from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, and an MA in Documentary Film Direction (DocNomads) from the University of Theatre and Film Arts (SzFE), Budapest. In the course of making a handful of unfashionable short films, Aman is honing a poetic expression marked by warmth, intimacy, and sensorial delight. His process-driven work in camera and edit moves between diary, essay, and portrait, arriving at an ardent yet meditative attention to elemental relations in the world he films. He listens to the periphery, notices islands of quiet hope, and tests ways of inhabiting shared presence with care. Interwoven with his artistic research, his work turns to experimental documentary—within a broad lineage of devotional cinema—to reimagine folklore as a contemporary practice of transmission: not as quotation, but as form—rhythm, refrain, gesture, and threshold—through which the symbolic and the sacramental can be carried into the present without being flattened into spectacle, and through which a viewer may find re-attunement in attention, relation, and meaning.
Known For
A reflection on celluloid dreams, fathers and sons, and the cyclical universe presented as a portrait of the erstwhile Prabhat Studio through the reunion of some of its oldest workers.
Prabhat Nagari - Film 1
Omar is a student from Syria, not a refugee. He was in Budapest on a scholarship when we first met. His voice was frank and his eyes fiery. He had a lot to say but he did not want to talk about the war back home. I filmed as I saw, as I perceived him moving in and out of uncertainty's quiet flicker. An unconventional portrait of my friend when he turned 23. His journey from Syria to Hungary, narrated as a blurry anecdote by the fire.
Portrait of Omar at 23
Some potted plants, odd hours of wakefulness, and the view from my window. A heliotropic film from the lockdown in Budapest.
Usambara Violet
In a quaint village on the Indian Konkan coast, in the time of yellow grass with steps receding and prayers unanswered, a desire for oblivion forks the search for images of exile and belonging.