Sanjana Chadrasekhar is an animator and filmmaker from India whose practice challenges orthodox modes of storytelling. The Dog with Wings is inspired by Chandrasekhar’s frustrations around the conversations surrounding queer and gender identity at home.. The animation has a dream-like essence of its own nature, structured around her father’s relentless interest for crosswords. This speaks to the cryptic duality of being queer within communal traditional Indian frameworks.

Sanjana Chadrasekhar “The cryptic-ness of the crossword represents the nature of the family’s relationship – the answer is there it just needs to be unpacked first. I did spend time trying to understand how cryptic crossword clues really worked, ex. Solving anagrams and trying to weave that concept into my script.