This Indian director made about 20,000 drawings for her Cannes-winning short film

In her first week at film school in London, Mansi Maheshwari heard a sentence that lit up her mental console. “We were doing a collaging exercise and there were many magazines open in front of us to choose pictures from. Our instructor, the Finnish animator Marjut Rimminen, said to me, ‘Choose the things that wink at you.’” Three years and a victory lap around the global film festival circuit later, the award-winning Indian director and animator—who has also produced knitwear capsules, flash tattoo sheets, stop-motion shorts, claymation figurines, murals and paintings—explains how those seven words changed her life. “I’ve applied what Marjut said to my whole life: what I wear, what I choose to do,” she says, tugging at the collar of her flame-red shirt with fire-breathing dragons printed on it that she found at a thrift shop in London on her 25th birthday. “If it catches my eye, it’s for me. If I have to think about it, it’s not.”