{"id":221,"date":"2026-07-24T09:24:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T09:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agorafilmspr.com\/?page_id=221"},"modified":"2026-07-25T06:50:44","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T06:50:44","slug":"the-ink-stained-hand-and-the-missing-thumb","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/agorafilmspr.com\/index.php\/the-ink-stained-hand-and-the-missing-thumb\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb<\/strong>
by Yashasvi Juyal<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

India, USA, Saudi Arabia | 2026 | 127′ | Color<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Festivals:<\/strong>
Karlovy Vary IFF (Proxima Competition)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the film:<\/strong>
If the world had an edge, it might look something like the remote corner of northern India where Santosh and Rajji live, collecting highway tolls in dilapidated booths. Work and endless waiting are blurred together. Bound by the power of love, but also by the need to constantly move around in search of work, they dream of the happiness that awaits them in a new place\u2026 until one day, a sudden tragedy turns their lives upside down. As melancholic as it is tender,\u00a0The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb<\/em>\u00a0is the story of everyone who has suffered an unexpected loss.\u00a0It is a heartfelt romance bordering on magical realism, a fleeting memory of a loved one fading into oblivion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Director’s Statement:<\/strong>
The Ink Stained Hand And The Missing Thumb is my debut feature fiction film. The film emerges from my lived experience of migration, memory, and resistance rooted in the Himalayan foothills and shaped by the uneasy presence of accelerated development. I come from Dehradun, a small town in the lower Himalayas. Historically, it has been a site of settlement for migrants from higher altitudes, drawn by work, education, and the promise of stability. A few kilometres from my childhood home lay a region that felt suspended from time – an enigmatic landscape of water bodies, dense flora and fauna,
frequent wildlife movement, and a quiet township that seemed to exist in dialogue with these elements. Family outings to this place have stayed
with me as unfinished memories, fragments of a landscape that felt both intimate and unknowable.
I belong to the Garhwali community of Uttarakhand, a community shaped by long histories of migration and displacement often driven by fear of invasion, survival, and economic necessity. From the higher Himalayas, we have steadily moved toward the plains. Returning to this childhood landscape years later, I found it saturated with supernatural lore, animal-linked rituals, and whispered accounts of extra-terrestrial sightings. These mythologies coexist with the land\u2019s material reality, forming a layered consciousness that deeply informs my storytelling practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the director:<\/strong>
Yashasvi Juyal ( b. 1996, Uttarakhand, India) is a filmmaker whose practice spans fiction and non-fiction cinema, working across writing, directing, and producing. His short fiction film THE LAST RHODODENDRON (2021), now streaming on MUBI, received the Gender Sensitivity Award at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (2021). His short documentary RAINS DON\u2019 T MAKE US HAPPY ANYMORE premiered at Visions du R\u00e9el (2025) and screened internationally at the Festival Internacional de Documentales de Buenos Aires (FIDBA), Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF), and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, among others & won Best Short Documentary at the Oslo Film Festival (2025). Yashasvi is an alumnus of Doc Producing South and was recently selected for the Red Sea Lab \u2013 Directors Program with Spike Lee. He is a recipient of Visions Sud Est, the Red Sea Fund, and the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity – TakeTen (India).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Press Coverage:<\/strong>
– A love story slowly transforms into a deep meditation on loss, existence, and the fragile traces we leave behind (ICSfilm<\/a>)
– Ghosts, Grief and a Vanishing Highway: \u2018The Ink Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb,\u2019 From India\u2019s Yashasvi Juyal, Arrives at Karlovy Vary (Variety<\/a>)
– Death is worth living! (DMovies<\/a>)
– Yashasvi Juyal\u2019s Inventive Debut Casts Grief Into Uncanny Reckonings (Outlook India<\/a>)
– Le film joue sa propre musique discr\u00e8te tout en offrant un excitant vertige. Voici l\u00e0 l\u2019une des r\u00e9v\u00e9lations de l\u2019ann\u00e9e (Le Polyester<\/a>)
– Interview with Yashasvi Juyal\u200b (Film Fest Report<\/a>)
– Interview with Yashasvi Juyal (DMovies<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumbby Yashasvi Juyal India, USA, Saudi Arabia | 2026 | 127′ | Color Festivals:Karlovy Vary IFF (Proxima Competition) About the film:If the world had an edge, it might look something like the remote corner of northern India where Santosh and Rajji live, collecting highway tolls in dilapidated booths. Work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"full-width","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-221","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agorafilmspr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agorafilmspr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agorafilmspr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agorafilmspr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agorafilmspr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agorafilmspr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231,"href":"https:\/\/agorafilmspr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/221\/revisions\/231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agorafilmspr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}