The veteran, Rama Rao, made a meticulous black-and-white piece about a banyan tree that remembers every family that ever lived beneath it. The phone-shot debutant, Anjali, spun a slice-of-life of an elderly man making idli for a daughter he can’t call. The playwright adapted a single-room stage drama into a single, unbroken take — a man waiting at a doorway that never opens. The exile’s film was loud, full of rage and song: a palace of mirrors where rulers discarded their crowns. The documentarian, Meera, found an abandoned hamlet where every house had a locked door — she used archival recordings to stitch the past to a child’s laugh. The visual poet painted in time-lapse sunsets and neon signoffs, ending on a doorway made of spilled paint. The colony boy, Vijay, crafted his entry from borrowed footage: an old cinema façade, an empty ticket booth, a poster torn in two — he narrated, voice trembling, about the way films can be the only home someone knows.