A frame from Sarah Pupo’s stop-motion animation video, What A Wild Night

At the start of the 13-minute short film, Flights Of Sleeping Birds, Sitaram, sitting under a tree in the north Goan village of Sal, crosses his legs, joins his hands mid-air in the form of prayer and says, "He holds his hands up like this, floating two feet above the ground. You can see everything but his face." The village elder is referring to Devschar, a semi-divine being, who is invoked by the villagers for a ritual called Gadde Utsav. The being is supposed to be made of light and travels through the forest like a giant firefly. "I heard about the ritual and stories around it from a local. It inspired me to shoot a documentary. Since I didn't want to make an anthropological film questioning the tradition, it morphed into a fiction project. It is narrated from the POV of two kids on a journey to discover their ancestral past," says artist Gayatri Kodikal, who shot the film in 2009.