Some stories move like ink across paper—smudged, stubborn, alive. Rachel Tom Antony’s award-winning film Kannimanga does exactly that. A design student barely past 21, she ignored the polite convenience of AI pipelines and instead sat down to draw every frame and every moment by hand. In conversation with Indulge about Kannimanga, Rachel didn’t begin with awards or technique. She began with a grandmother who wrote journals that no one will ever read.
The journals were burned. She found this out while researching for her graduation project. There was no explanation beyond a quiet warning from her father. That absence became the seed of her film. Not nostalgia, not sentiment, but a question she couldn’t shake. What do we inherit when the stories are gone? What remains when memory is deliberately erased?
Kannimanga is a 14-minute film, digitally hand drawn frame by frame without automation, or shortcuts. Rachel worked through chaotic months where sleep and routine dissolved, but she kept drawing. Scenes carried textures and colours from Kerala’s Thrissur. Floors she walked on as a child. Light she remembers without knowing why.
She says her professor Shaaz Ahmed helped her shape the narrative with patience. He guided pacing, trimming, and clarity. She says his feedback helped her understand what to keep, what to let go. The film is gentle in rhythm. It doesn’t hurry. It sits with the discomfort of not knowing someone who should have been familiar. It looks at family without romanticising it. Rachel says her grandmother wasn’t affectionate. Even when the grandchildren visited, she remained distant. She wasn’t the type to make conversation, let alone lullabies and bedtime stories. Making the film became a way for Rachel to meet her in another form. Not as a memory, or as fiction, but as a possibility.
The sound came from something uncomplicated. When asked, Rachel said as a child she made noises while she drew. She let that instinct guide her. The audio feels unpolished in a deliberate way, like it belongs to the same room as the drawings.
The ASIFA Award was great recognition for her, but more importantly, the film gave her closure. She learned that remembering isn’t always about what was preserved. Sometimes it is about what we rebuild with what is left. Kannimanga holds that truth. It is slow, patient, and personal. It invites you to look at memory not as an archive but as discovery. A story drawn carefully by someone willing to sit with it.
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