Kiss Wagon (2024): A dystopian mythical film replacing camera shots of faces with cardboard cutouts, mud, and twigs

Midhun Murali, a self-trained Malayali director from the southern state of Kerala, India, made the shadow-puppetry epic Kiss Wagon (2024) without cameras, live-action actors, or a crew. The almost three-hour animated feature, about a transgender or genderqueer, female courier who attempts to deliver a kiss to a mysterious recipient in a corrupt dystopian society ruled by a heteronormative and oppressive religious state, featured over 2,200 shots, each built from 30-40 individual layers of cardboard cutouts, DSLR-photographed images, and sometimes mud and twigs, altogether made to look a 3D story. Murali and his sole partner on Kiss Wagon (the female screenwriter and the only voice actor other than himself) scored the whole soundtrack at home without professional recording facilities and composed, sang, and produced the movie’s 14 original songs. I will deploy details from production history and textual excerpts to ask how DIY experimental auteurs of the digital era create new cinematic science fictions that challenge the “mastery” of commercial movie and TV sf, and why should we in the speculative media studies field care? How can formal qualities such as filmic ambiguity, folkloric complexity, precision of auteur creative expression, and narrative experimentation be elevated by homemade, handmade sf screen stories?