SYNOPSIS

A 40-year old alcoholic named Thakur, is riding his bike on a highway one night and dies a gruesome death. Next morning, Thakur’s bike disappears from the police station, and upon searching, the bike is found on the exact same spot where Thakur had died. After more such bizarre incidents, the villagers take these as signs from heaven and declare that Thakur has become a god. The locals start offering Thakur’s favourite thing, alcohol, to his bike. Miraculously, their prayers start getting answered. The news of this new god in town spreads across the region and a commercialized religion is formed. The movie revolves around the mystery of Thakur’s bike, people’s honest faith in the higher power, and how quickly a religion spreads like wildfire. The movie is inspired by true events.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

My grandmother used to take me to temples in the remotest villages in Rajasthan, a desert state in India. She used to pray devoutly and I was more interested in the stories that each and every one of these temples had to tell. Each temple had its own bizarre stories of its origin with quirky rituals, which for any outsider could be hard to digest. However, the one thing that I observed throughout my trips was the blind and honest faith that people had in their gods. It took me a while to grasp the true nature of this reality in which we exist. The answer was very simple, it is nothing but the manifestation power of people’s mind, which led to their prayers being answered. Dug Dug is a sort of religious satire where I have tried to explore the manifestation power of people’s faith, and how we have a deep desire to find answers to the things that are beyond us, just to make some sense of our existence. I have a deep desire to create my own world in cinema and I aspire to make movies that immerse the viewers fully and are a treat to their earthly senses. I have been heavily inspired by the works of Denis Villeneuve, Akira Kurosawa, Alfonso Cuarón, and Edgar Wright and they have helped me shape the cinematic language of my work. My film is a blend of larger than life cinematic visuals and unpretentious rawness of Indian rural life where I want viewers to lose themselves in the bizarre and colorful world of Dug Dug. Viewers may find my cinematic world to be very absurd, funny and bizarre. But I assure you, once you travel across India, you will realize that the reality is far more absurd than my film, Dug Dug.