Meet a creative tour de force who is disrupting how – and why – we tell stories.
Anand Gandhi is a filmmaker and philosopher. Science geek and inventor. Collector of stamps. A college dropout who has turned the world into his classroom and playground. He’s interested in the parts of the whole – the curiosities of culture. The complexity of humanity. The process and the system. Or as he puts it, “the cogs and gears behind the collapse of a marriage in a story… the engineering behind a bullet catch by a magician”.
No wonder then, that meticulous research and a scientific temperament undergird his work. But so do metaphors and analogies, paradoxes and parables that help this film festival favourite share his hopes, warnings, and insights for humanity, as he shared in a recent interview. In fact, he considers stories as “algorithms that we share with each other.”
And with each genre-bending tale that he spins, he is looking to “upgrade” our “genetic software.” His National Award-winning film debut Ship of Theseus reinterprets a Greek philosophical myth to discuss identity, beauty, meaning. Tumbbad twins folklore and horror to unpack toxic masculinity. The TV series OK Computer turns the AI’s ethical dilemmas into a mystery thriller.
And it’s not just on the silver screen that he’s meditating on the human condition or throwing up a mirror to our society. “My work is about a sum total of a wide variety of human enterprises, not just emotional expression,” he says. He has co-created political strategy board games Shasn and Azadi, now played in more than 75 countries, as well as one of the world’s first VR journalism platforms to feature thought-provoking non-fiction narratives. (He even advises start-ups that focus on the future of human living systems.)
Clearly, no medium is beyond reach. Just as he pored over library books and materials to build a seismograph when he was 11 years old, he continues to tinker with new tech and new frontiers. Last year, he showcased a stunning storyboard created entirely by AI for his upcoming sci-fi film Emergence.
In fact, consider Gandhi’s endeavours up till now as parts of a mind-boggling whole he has turned his attention towards: a paradigm-shifting mythology for the 21st century, Maya. An epic fantasy rooted in Indian land and lore, but with inputs from the best scientific and creative minds from across the world – including the creator of the Na’vi of the Avatar films. It will unfold through multiple perspectives on multiple platforms. Films, shows, graphic novels, board games. What possible human futures await us? Which social and moral contracts will get us there?
Under the banner of his Goa-based cinema and new media studio, Memesys Culture Lab, Gandhi and a band of thinkers, authors, artists are creating at the intersection of science, philosophy, culture, technology, art. At SYNAPSE, Anand Gandhi will unpack why we need stories – and a 21st century mythology. How he’s bringing the centre of storytelling back to the subcontinent. And how multiple mediums – old and new – are helping him communicate urgent stories and everyday heroes.
