Nil Battey Sannata ( Zero Divided By Silence ) doesn’t sound like a festival film, but debutante Ashwiny Iyer Tewari brought her film to the Work in Progress Lab to get an opinion and found a favourable response. “We never predicted that it could be a festival film. In preteens, kids usually think that their parents are their worst enemies. Set in a lower middle class milieu there is a mother who doesn’t have the money but she is encouraging her girl to study and can go to any lengths for that. But the girl doesn’t want to study, because she has her own mind. The story is universal and the best compliment came from the editorial mentor Francesca Calvelli who asked for a copy to show to her daughter. Others responded to the acting of Pankaj Shukla whose performance is as local as you get. And a cut that they have suggested is really going to be helpful in making the narrative more effective.”
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Similarly, Manav Kaul was apprehensive of bringing his work Tathagat to the Work-In-Progress Lab. “Set in the Himalayas it is 70 per cent silent. It is about a monk who wants to return to the life he once renounced but his disciples don’t allow him to. I was thinking they won’t get the inherent layers that are very Indian, but Marco Mueller, director of the Rome Film Festival, and others responded well and reassured me that I am on the right path.”
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Not to forget Thithi , a realistic comedy about three generations with different perceptions of life and how they react to death when the grandfather passes away. Set against the backdrop of village funeral rituals in Karnataka with rural idiosyncrasies dominating the narrative, the film was chosen as the best film in the fiction category at the lab, to the pleasant surprise of director Ram Reddy.
