Yashasvi Juyal did not make his way in cinema. He shot his way out.

“We never went down the release route from development,” says the Indian filmmaker about “The Ink Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb,” his debut feature, which premieres in the Proxima Competition in Karlovy Vary. “We filmed the movie and then started releasing it.”

The film follows Rajji, a toll booth worker in northern India, whose lover Santosh dies in a truck accident and returns 24 hours later as a spectral presence, floating between memory and the vanished world of the highway tollbooth where they worked. For Juyal, the montage was not a gender exercise. I was reporting.

“For us, the ghost is something that exists. We don’t believe it is in the stories,” Juyal says of growing up in the high Himalayas, where the film’s supernatural register comes from. “A lot of times we just talk about it matter-of-factly: ‘Oh, did you see a ghost yesterday?’ My friend says, ‘Oh, I saw it the day before yesterday.’ So, it is as common as that, and we have all had our experiences in the high Himalayas.”

That folklore has a specific source. “It’s also a tribute to my grandmother,” says Juyal, “because my grandmother lived in a village in the high Himalayas and she had this relationship with the supernatural that she used to tell me very naturally.”

The central character of the film is taken from life. Juyal had interviewed real toll booth workers for a short documentary, and one of them, also named Santosh, lived near the booth with a girlfriend who was saving money for a degree in physics while their relationship strained under the pressures of work and separation. Toll plazas, Juyal points out, are also some of the most dangerous places on Indian roads, where accidents occur almost constantly. Meeting the real Santosh again amidst that backdrop, Juyal asked him if danger scared him. “I told him, ‘You’re still working here, aren’t you afraid?’” Juyal recalls. “Then he said: ‘I’m not that, I’ve died and I’m a ghost.’” The joke became the seed of the film.

Behind the ghost story is a more concrete anxiety: infrastructure. Juyal describes constantly commuting between Dehradun and Delhi as a new highway reshaped his hometown, and one real accident, a truck crashing into a shed near his home, left him watching workers tape the structure “as if it were a human being.” The image of village life before and after the highway, and of the migration of generations of his own family from Karachi across the high Himalayas to Dehradun, directly feeds into the film’s sense of people caught in transit.

Humor runs alongside pain, by design rather than by accident in the editing. “I felt strongly that humor is the most… powerful tool to identify the character,” Juyal says, adding that spending time with the workers under an overpass during their off hours, even while they were drinking, shaped the film’s tone as much as its script did.

Influences came from both outside and within India. Juyal cites Apichatpong Weerasethakul for their shared interest in regional folklore and human-animal relationships, and experimental filmmaker Scott Barley for a way of constructing images and sound around abstraction rather than conventional narrative. Documentarian Shaunak Sen, who serves as the film’s executive producer, offered both a working model and mentorship. Sen’s “All That Breathes” was nominated for the 2023 Academy Award and won awards at Cannes and Sundance, among more than two dozen other festivals. “Shaunak has always been a huge inspiration,” says Juyal. “If they can do it, we should try to do it too.”

Funding came after filming, and in stages: a Take Ten grant from the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity launched production, a selection at the Hong Kong-Asia Film Funding Forum introduced the team to the Red Sea Fund, and one-on-one mentorship with Spike Lee through the Red Sea Directors Program followed. The Red Sea Post-Production Fund followed, then the Prasad Lab DI Award for post-production at the NFDC Film Bazaar in Goa, and Visions Sud Est after the premiere of Juyal’s short documentary “Rains Don’t Make Us Happy Anymore” at Visions du Réel. “In the end everything fell into place,” says Juyal. “This movie is a pure effort of working to the end and developing and developing and getting financed somehow.”

The film stars Dheeraj Kumar as Santosh and Bhumika Dube as Rajji, and is produced by Vikas Kumar, Sharib Khan, Viraj Sikand, Bhavna Kankaria and Neha Kaul, a team whose recent credits include Anuparna Roy’s Venice Horizons-winning film, “Songs of Forgotten Trees.”