Picture a small workshop in Goa, barely large enough to turn around in. A furnace glows in one corner, the air thick with heat and the faint metallic smell of melting gold. An artisan bends over a workbench, a single sharpened wire in hand, and begins to carve a name into a ring, stroke by careful stroke, with no machine to help him.
This is the world Prachi Shirodkar spent months filming for her documentary Bhaangar Kalakusar Karigiri, a world she knew intimately because her own father and grandfather had once worked in it.
The 28-year-old directed, shot and narrated the documentary, handling the filming herself, while her father wrote the script and her partner edited the film.
‘Lockdown changed all my plans’
Shirodkar was one year into a B.Arch degree in 2020 when the country went into lockdown.
Lockdown in 2020 prompted Prachi Shirodkar to leave architecture behind and discover her calling in storytelling.
With classes paused and the world outside shut down, she found herself alone with her thoughts for the first time in years. “When you’re by yourself, that’s when you really get to know yourself,” she says of that period.
What she discovered was that design had never been the thing pulling at her. Storytelling was, and always had been.
She had grown up around theatre and acting, but with no one in her family from the film or media industry, architecture had felt like the safer, more familiar choice after school.
The lockdown gave her room to reconsider, and she switched to mass communication instead. “This was my element,” she tells The Better India. “I am myself. I know what I’m doing, and I love it.”
Her father’s script, her camera & a story rooted in Goa
For her final-year project, Shirodkar turned the camera on the goldsmiths she had grown up watching at work. “I’m not trying to represent the community here; it’s about their art and their skill,” she says of her intention.
With no filmmaking experience or fixed schedule, Shirodkar began documenting artisans she had known since childhood. Photograph: (Still from the film)
She also made a deliberate choice to include women artisans in the film. “It’s not just men who do this anymore,” she says.
Making the film in Konkani was never really a decision at all. “I am Goan, this is happening in Goa, and Konkani is my mother tongue. I didn’t have to think twice,” she says, noting that even within the language, the dialects of Mapsa, Pernem and Margao carry their own small differences.
Her father, who had worked in the trade himself, wrote the film’s script in that specific vocabulary, giving her a foundation to build the film around.
Her father’s experience in goldsmithing shaped the documentary’s Konkani script, preserving the trade’s vocabulary and cultural roots.
The project almost didn’t happen. It began as a college group assignment that fell through when the group arrangement did not work out, and Shirodkar shelved it, intending to return to it only after graduation. It was her partner, Mario Pimenta, who convinced her to pick it back up. “It was his idea. I’m grateful he pushed for it,” she says.
He went on to edit the film while she handled the filming, direction and narration herself, despite having never operated a camera before. There was no fixed shoot schedule and barely any budget.
“Whatever I had in hand was what mattered,” she says of how she funded it. Shoots depended entirely on when her subjects, many of them relatives and family friends she had known for years, happened to be free.
A goldsmith engraving an entire name with a slender wire revealed the remarkable precision behind the traditional craft.
This meant filming in scattered bursts across several weeks rather than in one continuous run. Piecing together a coherent narrative from those fragments was one of the hardest parts of the process.
“I kept asking myself whether I had the flow right or was missing something,” she recalls. One moment stayed with her long after the shoot ended: a craftsman engraving a name into gold with nothing but a slim metal wire. “It doesn’t even look like a knife; it looks like a wire,” she says. “He carved the entire name using just that. Our hands are so skilled.”
‘You have a camera, you have a story’
The film’s festival run began with rejections. Then came an unexpected first selection at Jackson Doc Fest in Tennessee, USA, followed by screenings in Kerala at the International Folklore Film Festival and a selection for the International Cultural Journal Award in Uzhhorod, Ukraine.
It also won Best Documentary at the Miseentage Indian Film Awards, and Shirodkar was recently conferred a Young Achievers Award by Rotary International for her contribution to culture. “They just called out my name, and I was genuinely taken aback,” she says of the moment.
Shirodkar filmed the artisans herself, while her partner Mario Pimenta edited the footage into a cohesive story of Goa’s goldsmithing tradition.
She now works as an assistant director in Mumbai, and the scale of commercial production has reshaped how she thinks about her own filmmaking.
“What you learn in theory is so different from what happens in practice,” she says, adding that if she made the film again today, she would write a fuller script and bring in a dedicated cinematographer rather than shoot it herself.
Her advice to other young filmmakers starting out without money or a team is blunt and repeated often in conversation: find people you trust, however small the crew.
“If you have the right people with you, everything will fall into place,” she says. Do not let the absence of a budget stop you from starting.
Now an assistant director in Mumbai, Shirodkar urges young filmmakers to begin with the stories closest to home.
“There are filmmakers who have made it happen with very little money, and they’ve done so well,” she says. “You have a camera, you have a story. Just go shoot it.” And look close to home first, she adds, because the most powerful subjects are often the ones already around you. “Start from where you belong, and then go step by step.”
