EXCLUSIVE: Director Annapurna Sriram Shares Her Handmade Pitch Deck for F**Ktoys ahead of the Calgary International Film Festival

Recently, I spoke with Annapurna Sriram, the writer-director behind the bold new film Fucktoys, which is screening at the upcoming Calgary International Film Festival. Annapurna generously shared the original scanned pages from her film’s pitch deck — a handmade, collage-driven document that gives a first-hand look at the film’s creative DNA. These pages offer an intimate window into the director’s visual plans, tone, and influences in a way that digital PDFs rarely capture.

The pitch deck is tactile and deliberately rough-edged: torn paper, Polaroids, handwritten notes and pasted ephemera that together communicate a living aesthetic. Annapurna describes the film as “like if John Waters and Gregg Araki had a kid and that kid was the post-apocalyptic landscape of 80’s punk film Jubilee.” That comparison immediately signals a movie steeped in camp, transgressive humor, and a DIY counterculture attitude. The deck’s physicality underscores those sensibilities — everything feels handcrafted, visceral, and defiantly offbeat.

For readers encountering the film for the first time, the pitch deck functions like a mood board and a manifesto in one. It lays out characters, setting, and thematic concerns through images and candid notes. The deck’s 15 handmade pages map the film’s world: an urban-trash underworld populated by two central characters — AP, a psychic-obsessed sex worker who believes she carries a curse, and Danny, a bruised and tattooed partner-in-chaos with a recent prison past. Together they hurtle through a small, swampy, industrial town that feels like a hybrid of Appalachia and coastal everglades — a place that is simultaneously specific and mythic.

Visually, the deck emphasizes a look that is campy, trashy, kitschy and eerie — images of liquor-store aisles, bloodied heels, red scooters, motel snapshots and underpasses create a textured, tactile palette. Collages of altar trinkets and fortune-teller signs point to the film’s magical-realism elements, while references to cult and cult-adjacent films such as Jubilee, Female Trouble and The Doom Generation position Fucktoys within a lineage of transgressive arthouse cinema. These reference points help signal the film’s tone to programmers, critics, and potential collaborators.

Several pages contain director statements, production credits, and biographical notes presented not as polished studio copy but as collage work that blends ephemera — poker chips, candid party photos, and a lipstick-stained sink — with the filmmaker’s voice. The deck’s final pages include contact details and a handwritten “thank you” printed on a crinkled plastic bag, reinforcing the communal, low-budget spirit of the project.

This exclusive look at Annapurna’s original pitch deck is more than promotional material; it is an extension of the film’s identity. It shows how aesthetic choices are formed early in the creative process and how a director’s visual language is often crafted by hand. Annapurna’s approach is unapologetically anti-establishment and celebratory of outsider filmmaking — an approach that comes through in every photo, note and glued-on artifact.

Stay tuned for our full interview with Annapurna, where she expands on the provocative title, her decision to shoot on 16mm film and anamorphic lenses, the film’s anti-establishment sentiments, and her plans to bring Fucktoys to arthouse cinemas across North America. That conversation will explore creative choices, practical production stories, and the broader cultural ambitions that drive this singular piece of independent cinema.