Natesh Hegde grew up in a village in the Western Ghats of Karnataka where making films for a living was not something people did, or even imagined. Tiger’s Pond (Vaghachipani), his second feature, is the first Kannada-language film ever selected for the Berlinale’s Forum, and he discusses it with a calm that borders on serene.
The struggle for me is to stick to your way of making films, your approach, not get deviated by other factors.
A Village Ruled by Fear
The film is set in the hermetic hamlet of Vaghachipani, under the sway of a tiger god. Its real ruler is Prabhu (Achyut Kumar), a ruthless businessman maneuvering to win a local election with the help of his right-hand man, an outsider called Malabari (Dileesh Pothan). When Basu, a politically shrewd outcast worker played by Hegde’s own father, Gopal Hegde, stands up to their intimidation, the rigid feudal order starts to crack. Around the silent figure of Pathi, a mute maid, the film builds what the Berlinale calls a tale of structured oppression and spontaneous resistance, a simmering study of how caste, faith, and political power braid together in southern India, its faces and rocky terrain rendered in rapturous, grainy 16mm by cinematographer Vikas Urs in a way that refuses to turn the place into scenery. The seed was a haunting real image of violence and a whole system standing by to witness it, which lodged in his mind, fused with a short story by the Kannada writer Amaresh Nugadoni, and grew from there. It deepens the terrain of Hegde’s acclaimed 2021 debut Pedro, another Western Ghats story of a master and servant and a man denied a voice, which traveled from Busan to Pingyao and Nantes and was supported by the actor-filmmaker Rishab Shetty. This time the backing is heavier still, with celebrated director Anurag Kashyap among the producers and French outfit Loco Films handling world sales.
How He Found the Medium
Hegde never studied filmmaking. The urge to tell stories arrived early, around the final years of school, and he began writing short fiction, until his stories started filling up with descriptions of sound and instructions that read more like screenplays than prose. He realized he needed a different medium, took a master’s in journalism, and made a first black-and-white short in his village, casting his father and acting in it himself. The shift, as he describes it, was gradual and almost involuntary, less a career decision than a story finding its proper form.
Fearlessness as a Method
Here’s the stance worth drawing out, because Hegde presents his fearlessness as a personality quirk and it is really a working method. He says, almost with a shrug, that he has never understood the fear of failure, that the only struggle is staying faithful to your own way of seeing rather than being deflected by what others might think. Consider what fear of failure actually protects: it is the anxiety of someone with a career, a reputation, an expected path to fall from. Coming from a place with no precedent for any of this, no ladder to climb and none to fall off, Hegde owes nothing to an established order, which means the same marginality his film indicts becomes, for him as an artist, a strange kind of freedom. Handed no place in the hierarchy, he can simply make the film he sees.
Why He Refuses Coverage
This fearlessness shows up most concretely in how he shoots. Hegde refuses what most directors treat as basic insurance, the wide, the medium, the close, the turnaround of every scene, all those options preserved to fix things later in the edit. That hedging, he suggests, is just uncertainty about your own vision. He writes the shot, the frame, even the cut into the script, then collects exactly that, using, he claims, every single shot he films. The choice of 16mm is the same conviction made physical. Film stock punishes the unsure, since every foot costs money and you cannot roll endlessly and discover the movie later, so shooting on it is a wager that you already know your film. He wanted, too, a deliberately discarded look, an image that seems found behind a building somewhere, a little dirtied, as if the footage had been unearthed rather than shot, which is its own quiet thesis: the truth of this village is something to be exhumed, like evidence, not polished and presented. The whole film was shot in a single thirty-day stretch, and the memory he returns to is wholly physical: a team of seven or eight people lashing a tiger idol weighing over a hundred kilos to bamboo poles and carrying it into position.
The Film That Showed Him the Way
His one true cinematic origin story is a film he stumbled on by accident.
As a young man he read about Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and watched it on a terrible YouTube print, and a single image undid him: the protagonist idly kicking an empty can down the road, the story simply halting so you could watch life unfold. It taught him that his own life could be a film. The kinship runs deeper than he says, since Close-Up is a docufiction in which the real people play themselves, much as Hegde casts his electrician father in role after role. He insists he does not consciously imitate Kiarostami, and his film also belongs beside two he does not name: Mari Selvaraj’s Pariyerum Perumal, a searing study of caste and resistance in a southern Indian village, and Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court, a patient, observational dissection of a social system that broke out internationally as Hegde’s work now does.
Crime on the Surface, Something Else Underneath
For all that the festival files it as a crime drama, Hegde resists the label.
I don’t approach it as a crime film. For me, it’s a human story.
That distinction matters, because what frightens others is exactly what his composure frees him to film. You cannot make a movie that quietly accuses an entire social order of brutality if you are afraid of how it lands, afraid of the people in it, afraid of failing to please. His equanimity, the chillness the conversation keeps circling, is not detachment; it is the settled calm of someone who has decided that the only real failure is not making the thing at all. The fearlessness and the politics turn out to be a single gesture. Sound is where he says he builds that world most deliberately, recording on location and layering ambient textures and foley by hand rather than pulling from a library, on the principle that an image gives you one layer while sound is close to infinite, and the craft lies in knowing how much to withhold.
The Father on the Road
The most affecting story he tells is from his very first shoot, when his father had to lie down in the road while the whole village watched, an exposure humiliating for them both, with tears in the older man’s eyes. Hegde went to him and said that since they had chosen to make art, this was what they would have to face, and the moment became, in his telling, a kind of healing, a pact to do whatever it took. They have worked together ever since, and intend to keep doing so. It is the same ethic he leaves for anyone starting out, delivered without a flicker of doubt: just make films, and keep on making them.
