---
title: Chalchitra
emoji: 📽️
colorFrom: yellow
colorTo: gray
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 6.18.0
python_version: '3.13'
app_file: app.py
pinned: false
license: mit
short_description: a film for this moment
tags:
  - thousand-token-wood
  - best-demo
  - off-brand
  - track:wood
  - achievement:offgrid
  - achievement:offbrand
  - achievement:sharing
  - achievement:fieldnotes
---

# Chalchitra · चलचित्र

**A film for this moment.** Bring up to four images and an optional fragment —
a feeling, a line, or nothing at all — and Chalchitra reads the mood beneath
them and names three films that belong to it. Not by genre or rating, but by
the texture of a feeling.

A small vision model does the seeing, running on the Space itself — no cloud
API in the loop. Stateless by design: refresh, and the moment is gone.

## How it works

You drop in up to four images and, if you like, a fragment of text. A vision
model reads the atmospheric and emotional texture — the quality of light, what
moment in life this is — and returns a short interpretation plus three films,
each with a felt rationale for why it belongs here. When you've typed a
fragment, your words *lead* the reading. Ask again and you get a fresh set
(it remembers what it has already shown you, this session only).

## The tech

- **Model:** Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct (≤32B), run **in-process on ZeroGPU** — the
  model answering is the one on the Space, no hosted API.
- **Frontend:** a custom React interface (amber, polaroid, *In the Mood for
  Love* register) served from a Gradio app on the Space — a long way past the
  default Gradio UI.
- **Backend:** a pluggable LLM oracle behind a frozen JSON contract, with
  server-side image sanitisation, a bounded quality retry, and graceful
  failure states. Provider-swappable (LM Studio locally, in-Space model on
  deploy) without touching the frontend or the prompt.

## Hackathon

- **Track:** An Adventure in Thousand Token Wood
- **Badges:** Best Demo · Off Brand — a genuinely custom React interface,
  served from the Gradio app and well beyond the default Gradio UI

- **Demo video:** https://youtu.be/GeBFQXVBqQs
- **Social post:** https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ajit3259_chalchitra-a-film-for-this-moment-activity-7471894016960344064-I1Au
- **The story (how & why we built it):** https://ajit3259.substack.com/p/chalchitra-a-film-for-this-moment

---

Music in the demo: *"Reverie"* by Scott Buckley — CC-BY (scottbuckley.com.au).
The opening frame is from the series *Love Through Prism*; the pencil drawing is the author's own.