The article looks at 'The Calf Doll', Ankur Hooda’s debut film which explores themes of loss, changing rural economies and the erosion of identity, using the death of a calf and the making of a calf doll as a central emotional thread. The piece also situates the film within India’s slow cinema movement.
Carol Sturka, the protagonist of ‘Pluribus’, calls the horn of a passing train the loneliest sound in the world. In Haryana-based filmmaker Ankur Hooda’s enthralling debut, ‘The Calf Doll’, it is affirmed, once again. As a retired professor sits in a field after a particularly terrible morning, the rumblings of a nearby train become the soundtrack of a sweeping tide that has slowly shifted both his life and the ground beneath him.
‘The Calf Doll’, which recently had its world premiere at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, 2026, examines the cultural and emotional implications of urbanisation and the way in which it slowly erodes lifestyles and ecosystems that don’t quite fit into its vision. The story follows a retired teacher or ‘Masterji’ who owns cattle and a small farm, which is getting harder and harder to maintain, especially the day his farm hand leaves to get a job in the city, and his cow delivers a stillborn calf.
In his attempt to save a “spoilt” cow who isn’t lactating out of the grief of losing her child, Masterji turns to an outlawed ritual, crafting a calf doll from a stillborn’s body. As he grapples with the loss of this calf, the death of his own identity as a rural herdsman seeps in under the encroachment of capitalistic urbanisation, constantly looming over his village, Dayalpur. Whether it’s the raucous dance music blaring in the distance as Masterji struggles to milk his cow, the drone of aeroplanes, and the glimmer of the city on the horizon at night, or the village vet who’s running a side gig selling cows to large-scale dairies to make a profit, the new world is slowly closing in, pushing a whole way of life into a tight corner.
The film is a para-fiction starring Ankur's family, conceived from a memory of him seeing his grandfather sitting alone on a brick wall of his farmhouse, gazing at the neighbour’s cow with child-like desolation and longing after reluctantly selling his own herd. “The image stayed with me, haunting in its simplicity. On the surface, it seemed to reflect old-age ennui, yet held a metaphysical undercurrent that was harder to grasp,” he recalls. “What remains of you when you lose what has defined you for a lifetime?”
In his film, Ankur handles that question with utmost care. Masterji’s story here is approached with a thinning of the veils between his inner world and the reality he is dealing with. The lingering shots of the land and the trees rustling in the wind mourn for the death of the calf and all that it represents. As Masterji stares into the leaves or the static of his old TV before slipping into slumber, they also become a portal to his psyche that is wounded by this death that we witness through haunting dreamscapes. The eeriness of magical realism is always around the corner in the film, just as the abject shock of a tragedy makes its presence ineluctable in our lives.
And most of this is achieved through Ankur's best friend Anish Sarai’s masterful cinematography. “Art and cinema might actually be the last of many things that we bond over. We already shared a similar visual sensibility from much before the film because both of us have always engaged with photography in our own ways,” notes the filmmaker. "Across the rural landscapes, the hanging fog and mist, the minimal compositions with empty space, the soft and often overcast winter light, animals standing still, and the many eerie shapes that different trees make, we naturally gravitate towards these things and they are some of the common elements in both of our works. On set, we were simply following our instincts.”
“I had a very loose narrative in my head, almost like a feeling rather than a structure, and a question that stayed with me throughout was whether we could make a film without deciding too much in advance? Something like how a painter builds a canvas stroke by stroke or how a poet finds a poem word by word.”Ankur Hooda
The indie film scene in India is experiencing a delightful slow-cinema revolution, with the work of Achal Mishra, Nidhi Saxena, Indikar Akshay, Payal Kapadia, Aranya Sahay, Bhargav Saikia, and Rohan Parshuram Kanawade over the past few years. ‘The Calf Doll’ fits right into that family, privileging a deeply local story that is so finely polished it touches the buried gold of the human condition itself. In a post-Dhurandhar era, we’re lucky to have filmmakers who have chosen to exist within this space.
Ankur was born into a family of teachers and professors in a small village in Haryana, the same world seen in the film, but growing up, he was not allowed to step out into the village, so literature became his way of experiencing it, shaped deeply by the complete works of Munshi Premchand and also by Anton Chekhov. He lost his father when he was six, and he thinks ideas of death and loss entered his life very early, something he connects with Anish over as well. When he moved to the city at 14 for education, it created a kind of emptiness in him that later turned into a strong need to return and understand those spaces again. He has also been witnessing the slow erosion of rural life over the years, all of which found its way into the film without him consciously placing it there.
'Anhey Ghore Da Daan' by Gurvinder Singh, the first film Ankur watched at 15, introduced him to the medium and filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami, Yasujirō Ozu, Béla Tarr, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan further shaped his sensibilities, a lineage that can clearly be traced in the film. "I was deeply engaged with writing prose and poetry by then. But the film showed me what cinema could be and all the endless possibilities that arrive with it to tell stories,” he shares. “In a way, making this film and now deciding to move back to my village to live there permanently feels like coming full circle.”
Follow Ankur here.
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