Ashvin Kumar

Ashvin Kumar is an Indian filmmaker.

The film was based upon a real-life incident in the year 2000, where a young goatherd crossed the Indian-Pakistan border and was subsequently imprisoned by the Indian police.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Prime Minister of India, freed the boy as a peace gesture intended to improve Indian-Pakistan relations.

In the film, a 12-year-old Pakistani boy named Jamal mistakenly crosses the border into Indian territory while attempting to retrieve a cricket ball.

While Indian soldiers search the village for the Pakistani "terrorist", the boy is given shelter by an elderly Brahmin schoolteacher named Bhola, despite the latter's deep-rooted prejudice against Muslims, and the objections of Bhola's niece, Rani.

The story is set near the Gujarat border between India and Pakistan, but the film was made in five days in a village outside Jaipur in Rajasthan.

Kumar's mother, the fashion designer Ritu Kumar, designed the clothes for the actors.

The film is a "live action short", just 15 minutes in length.

It has been described as the first short film to get a commercial release in India.

The film was crewed through the Shooting People organisation; members who liked the script paid their own fares to travel to India to film it.

Kumar became the only Indian to be nominated for an Oscar in the short film category.

The Forest was loosely based upon the writings and exploits of Jim Corbett and uses the tale of a man-eating leopard to address environmental concerns.

He wrote / directed and produced India's only Oscar-nominated short film, Little Terrorist (2004), with his debut film Road to Ladakh being released in the same year.

The film is 48 minutes long, and was released in 2004.

Kumar has described this film as his "film school", referring to him dropping out of the London Film School and investing the course fees into the making of this film.

Kumar learnt production and post production by immersing himself into various roles and learning the craft on-the-fly while putting his own film through the many stages of production.

He describes it as a process of trial and error from which he emerged with a completed film.

For starters, "Road to Ladakh was a disaster of a film shoot, we were lucky to get the film done" "Out of a ten-day shoot, it was raining on five days. So, we had to finish the shoot in half the time. There was just one petrol pump (in Spiti valley where the film was shot) – we had seven cars and two trucks and a cast and crew of 40 people (who were staying in camping tents that later got flooded) looking at me for directions at every step. There I was – my first film, in Ladakh, and I thought to myself – what the hell have I got myself into?"

In 2005, Kumar became the youngest Indian writer/director to earn a nomination for an Academy Award Oscar nomination.

He is also the first Indian to be nominated at the European Film Academy with his film Little Terrorist.

Ashvin Kumar was born in Kolkata, India.

He is fashion designer Ritu Kumar's son.

He did his schooling at La Martiniere Kolkata, Modern School, and The Doon School, Dehradun.

He went on to study at St. Stephen's College, New Delhi, where he was an active member of the Shakespeare Society, and then at Goldsmith College in London, where he received a bachelor's degree in media and communication.

He also studied briefly at the London Film School.

Kumar's first feature film was Road to Ladakh, which took nine months to make, although the actual filming was done in 16 days.

His second film, a short film title Little Terrorist (2005), was substantially more successful, winning an Academy Award nomination and a nomination for the European Film Awards, as well top prizes at the Tehran International Short Film Festival, Flanders International Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, Manhattan International Short Film Festival, and the São Paulo International Short Film Festival.

The film was to over 120 film festivals around the world.

This film was shot in the tight budget in the deserts of Rajasthan.

The experiences of this shoot are captured in the making-of documentary The Near Un-making of Road To Ladakh which accompanies the film on a DVD released for the first time in India in 2009 through Junglee Video (the DVD label of Times Music) in a double bill with Little Terrorist.

The DVD also contains a making-of documentary of Little Terrorist.

Starring Irrfan Khan and Koel Purie (of Everybody Says I'm Fine!), Road to Ladakh follows the surreal rites of passage encounter between a dysfunctional, coke-snorting fashion model and an ultra-focussed, strong-silent stranger who are thrown together by chance.

Road To Ladakh was set near the borders of India and Pakistan, and employed a multi-national European crew.

It hit several obstacles in the Himalayas and was nearly not completed, as documented in The Near Un-making of Road To Ladakh.

He also made the feature-length documentary films Inshallah, Kashmir (2012) and Inshallah Football (2010); feature-length thriller The Forest (2012); and coming-of-age tale Dazed in Doon (2010).

The film is feature-length (86 minutes), and was released in theatres in India on 11 May 2012.

The plot concerns a married couple who arrive at a wildlife sanctuary in the Kumaon Hills to attempt to mend a faltering marriage.

An unforeseen threat takes the form of an ex-lover turned wildlife warden.

While the husband and lover quarrel, a man-eating leopard is on the prowl, and both men must unite in order to outwit the predator and survive the night.

While The Forest is a conventional action film, Kumar intended the film to convey a strong pro-environmental message.