Born in 1988 in Kerala, India, Varun Sasindran gained a degree in electronics and communications engineering and worked as a software engineer for 4 years before deciding in 2012 to leave his job to study film. He studied at the University of Calicut in Kerala, at the Sarajevo Film Academy and at Le Fresnoy in France. His short film ‘Omarska’ received special mentions at the 2019 Berlinale and the Kiev International Short Film Festival, and won Best Director at the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival. It has been screened at several festivals around the world.
For his residency at the Chateau de Goutelas in 2020, he planned to produce an initial video for his documentary ‘Hajra’, which follows a concentration camp prisoner during the war in Bosnia. He works with archive video footage of legal proceedings (of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) as well as interview material from his 2019 visit to Prijedor and his research trip in Bosnia.
Residency postponed to 2021.