People ask me why we chose a single take. Why not shoot normally and then edit nicely? But when a man is waiting for a sign from God, time itself is pressure. Time cannot be cut. Time cannot be rearranged. Time is the antagonist. In formal terms, the work operates as a chamber piece: a single human performer, a single spatial axis, and a fixed ritual site functioning as both narrative container and psychological field. Its authorial stance is less about stylistic display and more about a restrained auteur practice: observing without rearranging, shaping without imposing.
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I did not enter the cinema thinking one day I would stand inside a rural shrine negotiating with the community over whether a newly made ritual object could enter their existing symbolic order. But films take you to strange corners of the world and stranger corners of your own belief. An Order from the Sky, our Indo-American, Tamil-language film, took me further than I expected, even after the intense training of Pebbles, India’s 2022 Oscar entry, where I worked as an assistant director. That film was hard, but this one was a different difficulty, a quieter but more slippery one. The entire movie rests on breath, sunlight, and a man asking for a sign from the sky. It had to be done in one single take. Seventy-five minutes. One character. One camera. No cheating. No cutting away from mistakes. No saving the day in an edit room.
People keep telling me, “It’s a world first.” But when we started, I didn’t think like that. I only thought about how to not break the trust of the villagers, how to keep the actor alive emotionally for seventy-five minutes, how to make the hen behave like part of the world, and how to shoot with only sunlight and natural sound without irritating the gods or the people living around the shrine.
The film is based on a story by the respected Tamil writer Imayam, whose characters breathe the dust of ordinary life, not heroic, not decorative, just truthful. The core is simple but heavy: a petty thief who cannot begin his day without getting a sign from a deity. He asks for a gecko call. If the gecko gives a sign, he feels the world has allowed him to continue. If not, he feels blocked. This practice is widely embedded in rural auditory sign systems. It is funny sometimes but also painful, because it reveals how people depend on something beyond themselves when they feel powerless.
A still of the actor sitting before the deity during a scene.
When I first read Imayam’s story many years ago, I saw not a thief but a man who cannot trust his own mind. He needs permission from the sky. That became the emotional spine of our film.
And to do justice to this spine, our director, Karthik Radhakrishnan, and I felt the story must unfold in real time. No cuts. No manipulation. Let the audience feel the heat, the waiting, the frustration, the hope. Continuous cinema has its own honesty. I have admired other one-take films – Russian Ark, Victoria, Boiling Point – but all of them have many characters, extras, and dynamic environments. Ours has one man and one hen. And that makes it harder in another way: the entire frame is naked. If the actor slips for a second, the spell breaks. If a sound booms unnaturally, the spell breaks. If the camera hesitates, the rhythm collapses.
So making this film was like performing surgery in a crowded street during peak traffic.
Finding the Actor Who Could Carry an Entire Film in His Chest
When we decided to cast only one human character for the full seventy-five minutes, I knew the biggest burden would fall on the actor. He had to sustain a very emotional, very unstable state without a single break. Not even a sip of water. Not even one moment to gather himself.
We searched for months. Many actors came with confidence, but they couldn’t dedicate a whole year for the project and long-take rehearsals for six months. Ten minutes itself is a mountain. Seventy-five minutes without a cut is something else. Many film actors are trained for camera angles, not for uninterrupted live presence.
Finally, we found Baskar, a veteran from the Koothu-p-Pattarai theatre tradition. That tradition teaches stamina. They rehearse for hours until the body becomes an instrument. When Baskar auditioned, he didn’t “act”; he dissolved. Even in silence, he carried tension. He had a face that could show guilt and devotion at the same time.
And most importantly, he had the humility to surrender to the form. A single-take film is not about glamour; it is about discipline bordering on suffering.
I told him straight: “You must be willing to repeat the entire seventy-five minutes every single day for weeks. If one leaf falls wrong, we must restart. Can you handle it?”
He didn’t say any big actor lines. He only nodded and said, “We will rehearse.”
That is how I knew he was right.
Actor Baskar looking upward during a scene.
Negotiating Ritual Authorization
The film could not be shot on a set. It had to be a real rural shrine, with the dust, the uneven stones, the smell of incense, the unpredictable behavior of animals and humans. The character is speaking to a deity from his real world, not a decorative set piece. So we scouted villages and talked to the elders. We explained the story again and again.
But the villagers were very firm: “You cannot place an artificial deity inside a sacred space.”
I understood them. The idea of placing a newly made deity next to their long-existing guardian spirit felt wrong to them. They feared disrespect. They feared spiritual imbalance. And to be honest, I also felt nervous. Cinema is important to me, but people’s belief systems must be handled carefully.
One panchayat proposed a solution often used in their local adjudication system: “Let God decide.”
According to the local consent protocol, two ritual markers – ash and vermillion – were sealed in identical chits. A neutral child participant drew the ash-coded chit in accordance with the community’s established selection procedure.
We tried two other potential locations. Both received “no.” Only this shrine said “yes.” So we accepted that the film belongs to this place.
This became a responsibility. We were entering a space where belief is not a concept; it is life. We were entering with equipment, cables, mics, tripods. We had to behave like guests.
A Prop That Turned into a Deity
The sculptor made the deity with such authenticity that even I, during night rehearsals, sometimes forgot it was a prop. Villagers, passing by, began incorporating it into their daily ritual gestures, without filmmaker prompting or explanation. At first, we tried to gently explain, but later we stopped interfering. Who are we to say what is real and not real? Cinema is an illusion, yes, but faith works differently. If a community recognizes a ritual object as sacred, its function shifts accordingly within that cultural framework.
By the end of the shoot, some villagers said, “Don’t take this deity away.”
We did another divination ritual to be respectful. This time we got permission to move it, but not to discard it.
So we installed it at the entrance of my own village, Sooriyur. Today the figure continues to receive daily offerings within the village’s devotional practice. A production object transitioning into ritual continuity is something that exceeded our production intentions, moving well beyond what we planned or predicted. But sometimes cinema gives birth to something that escapes our control. And that is beautiful.
Artisans constructing the prop figure.
The prop figure as it stands in the hometown shrine, incorporated into the space by the local community.
Six Months of Rehearsals: Actor, Camera … and One Hen
If you ask me the hardest part of making a single-take film, I will not say the actor. I will not say the camera. I will say: the sun.
We shot with natural light. No reflectors, no artificial lights. So we rehearsed three times a day: 9 a.m., 12 p.m., and 3 p.m. We studied how shadows fell on the deity, how light bounced off the sand, how the actor’s face looked when he bent down or stood up.
We created a seventy-five-minute timeline matching the sun’s travel.
But the most unexpected collaborator was the hen. In the story, the hen becomes a witness; not a symbol in a heavy, philosophical sense, but a simple presence that says nature is watching.
For the film to work, the hen had to be comfortable with the camera. In the beginning, every time the camera moved fast, the hen panicked and ran. After one month of daily rehearsals, it stayed calm. After six months, it functioned as a nonhuman durational presence within the frame.
All animal interaction was supervised, and when brief tethering for positional continuity was required, it was done in a contained, calm environment, with the hen’s safety and comfort prioritized throughout the real-time shoot.
I still remember one rehearsal where the hen walked elegantly through the frame at exactly the right time. Baskar said, “Even the hen is doing better than me today.”
He was only half-joking.
Actor Baskar in character, holding a hen during filming.
The Soundscape We Couldn’t Control, and Didn’t Want To
Because the entire film is real time, we recorded live sound. No dubbing. No corrections later. That meant every village noise became part of the music of the film: children running, goats bleating, wind rustling against leaves.
Once, during a rehearsal, another villager came to the shrine concerned about her husband who was being beaten by other villagers. She cried to the deity about her problems. Her plea was almost identical to the film’s scene. For a moment we all froze. It felt like the script had stepped out of its own body.
Another day, the actor shouted too loudly during a rehearsal, and villagers thought he was disrespecting the shrine’s sacred protocol. They came angry. We explained again and again. After that, we toned down some heavy swearing from the film. When the character gets frustrated, Baskar would make a suppressed beep sound, like a muted cry, instead of vulgarity. Oddly, this ended up feeling more truthful. Many people, when angry at God, swallow the words rather than shout them.
Cinema is sometimes corrected by life.
The Difficulty of Losing at Minute 58
On shoot days, we attempted three takes a day. Each attempt was seventy-five minutes, from the beginning. If something went wrong at minute 4, fine. But if something went wrong at minute 58 or 63 or 70, we had to start the entire hour again.
Sometimes the coconut wouldn’t break at the right moment. Sometimes the incense wouldn’t light. Once the hen wandered off-frame. Once the sun dipped too fast behind a cloud.
I remember one take where everything was perfect; Baskar was trembling with emotion, the camera movement was smooth, the sound clear, and at minute 58 a small plastic wrapper flew into the frame because of wind. It destroyed the moment. We decided to discard the take.
Throwing away one hour of magic because of one second of mistake, this is the cruelty of single-take cinema. But I also think it is the honesty of it. You don’t get to hide flaws. You must flow with the world exactly as it is.
Actor Baskar in frame as the crew films a scene.
Actor’s Aftermath: When Performance Leaks into Life
By the third day of shooting, Baskar’s voice was breaking. He had to shout, plead, whisper, cry, all in real time. No cut to give him water. No “reset.” He had to carry fear, devotion, guilt, and irritation without a break.
After the shoot, when he went to tea shops wearing a costume, people thought he was a beggar. They avoided him. He later told me, “I struggled to come out of the character. At night I felt like the thief was still inside me.”
This is the cost of single-take immersion. The line between role and self blurs.
But maybe that is the point. If the camera can’t blink, the actor’s truth cannot blink either.
Why Real-Time, Single-Axis Cinema Suited This Chamber Piece
People ask me why we chose a single take. Why not shoot normally and then edit nicely? But when a man is waiting for a sign from God, time itself is pressure. Time cannot be cut. Time cannot be rearranged. Time is the antagonist. In formal terms, the work operates as a chamber piece: a single human performer, a single spatial axis, and a fixed ritual site functioning as both narrative container and psychological field. Its authorial stance is less about stylistic display and more about a restrained auteur practice: observing without rearranging, shaping without imposing.
Films like Russian Ark use single takes to show grandeur. Victoria uses it to show chaos. Boiling Point uses it to show workplace stress. Our film uses it to show hesitation: the feeling of standing between action and consequence, between guilt and justification, between faith and doubt.
The continuity forces the audience to sit inside the man’s mind. They cannot escape. They feel the heat. They feel the waiting. They feel the ritual, the boredom, the sudden bursts of emotion.
If we had cut the film into pieces, we would have lost the man’s psychological rhythm.
I kept comparing our approach to Cast Away, not in scale but in the idea of externalizing internal conflict. Tom Hanks speaks to a volleyball. Our thief speaks to a deity. The deity is silent. But silence does not mean absence. Silence becomes a mirror.
On set during the filming.
When a Film Changes a Village and the Crew
The most surprising thing for me is not the world record. Not the technical difficulty. Not even the hen’s perfect performance.
The surprising thing is that the prop figure we created continues to exist within the village’s ongoing ritual ecology.
A production object transitioning into sustained communal use and ritual integration: this is something no production planner can predict. It is beyond logic. Beyond cinema. Beyond me.
When we moved the deity to Sooriyur village, people welcomed it like it had always belonged. Children greet it every morning. Elders touch its feet. Everyone offers flowers. Every time I see this, I think: sometimes the boundary between art and faith dissolves. And maybe that is the highest place cinema can reach.
A World-First, Yes, but Also a World of Small Hands Helping
People keep repeating the phrase “world’s first 75-minute, single-take, single-character film.” It is true. But records are not the heart of this project. The heart is the team: small, dedicated, stubborn.
There were days when the camera operator forgot to breathe because he had to maintain smooth shoulder movement for 75 minutes. There were days when I worried villagers would stop us permanently. There were days when the hen behaved better than all of us.
And there were people who supported us both in India and the United States. Cinema is never a single person’s miracle. It is a chain of invisible hands.
Left to right: Maheshwarapandiyan Saravanan, Baskar, and Karthik Radhakrishnan on the set.
Conclusion: When the Path to Permission Stabilized
I often return to the initial authorization ritual, in which a child participant drew the ash-marked chit according to established village protocol. That moment was not just permission for the shoot; it was a metaphor for the entire film.
Our thief waits for a sign from the sky.
We also waited for a sign.
And eventually, the community pathway aligned for the film to proceed.
Cinema rarely anticipates the afterlives of the objects it creates.
This film began as a technical experiment. It ended as something more tender. A journey about fear, ritual, and waiting, both on-screen and off.
I still don’t know whether we made this film, or this film made us.
Acknowledgment
My thanks to Dr. Vinith Bejugam and Mitesh Kumar Patel for helping us cross frontiers and exploring the American landscape in terms of movie release, research, and media outreach. Their help came at the right moment, when we were trying to understand a world far from the rural shrine where this film was born.
Works Cited
Imayam, “An Order from the Sky.” Indian Literature, story no.1, pages 7–17. HarperCollins India. Feb 7, 2023. https://www.amazon.com/Order-Sky-Other-Stories/dp/9356294240#.
India Book of Records. “Film Shot in a Single Take with a Single Character.” 2024, page 9. India Book of Records e-magazine, https://indiabookofrecords.in/ibr_emagazine_eng_oct23/.
International Book of Records. “Longest Single Shot Feature Film with a Single Character.” 2024. https://www.internationalbookofrecords.com/records/longest-single-shot-feature-film-with-single-characte/.
Koothu-P-Pattarai Theatre Tradition. https://www.koothu-p-pattarai.org/.
An Order from the Sky: Profile & Trailer. https://filmfreeway.com/projects/2767354.
Barantini, Philip. Boiling Point, 2021.
Schipper, Sebastian. Victoria, 2015.
Sokurov, Alexander. Russian Ark, 2002.
Zemeckis, Robert. Cast Away, 2000.
Author’s Note
All reflections, ritual descriptions, and production interpretations in this essay are presented solely from the filmmaker’s standpoint and do not claim to represent, certify, or generalize community belief systems. Any reference to cultural practice is included only to document production circumstances, not to assign theological meaning.
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All images appear courtesy of the director.
