Sulemani Keeda is fast wriggling its way to different cities and the team is enjoying the journey. The film is witty and matter-of-factly written and yet the writer-director Amit Masurkar says it is a ‘film with a story and yet there is no story’. There is no message, no ‘story’ but is a reflection of the life of many writers who struggle to get their scripts read or even accepted at times. The characters are the focus,” explains Amit.
Amit says there is a part of him in the story because he dropped out of Engineering college to take up writing and has since spent more than 10 years in the industry. Amit says he has done everything needed to learn the nuances of the industry “of which I have been writing for so long. I have been writing for TV and also wrote the Hindi version of Happy Days for Sekhar Kammula. However, most of the works haven’t fructified due to some issue or the other.” As a result, his Bollywood stint was taking a backseat. Amit says “when Happy Days (Hindi) was about to go on the floor, 3 Idiots was ready and we didn’t want to clash with a similar college story. Another project was about to get ready when the leading actor backed out.”
Amit right now is definitely happy with the result of Sulemani Keeda . The team is pleased with the response from press, reviews and online word of mouth publicity and is also surprised at how the movie is being lapped up by audiences. That, without any publicity “because we had no money. Online publicity has done a great deal of work for us. When things were not falling in place I said to myself ‘I came to make films and if things are not happening in the right direction because I am waiting for someone to direct it, I better take things in my own hands,” he says explaining why a writer became a director. Amit attributes his success to the trust his friends had on him and his work.
The 89-minute film had it share of ifs and buts with a storyline which ran thus: Dulal, a brooding, self conscious writer and his hustler friend, Mainak dream to write a Bollywood film. Their picaresque journey brings them to a position where they are forced to choose between friendship, love and a big break. Besides exploring the subculture of migrant writers in the city’s western suburbs, the film also talks about their hopes and ontological anxiety.
“We just managed to finish the shoot of the movie with Rs. 8.5 lakhs and were considering if we should approach producers for more funds. This was the time when IIFI happened in Goa and Channel 4 picked it up for us. That gave all the help we needed and Tulsea Pictures who was the original production house was joined by Mantra/Runaway Entertainment,” explains Amit.
The rest, Amit says, is history. Amit’s choice of story and shooting venues is well thought of and he says, “in Versova if you eavesdrop in any coffee shop you will know a script is being discussed. Versova is where all writers meet, stay and move around in the hope of their script being read or selected.”
Amit’s lead actors Mayank Tiwari and Naveen Kasturia are not actors ; they are a writer and an assistant director respectively. Mayank Tiwari was in fact a journalist covering the crime beat who quit journalism to write movies. Amit says he met them individually as friends and saw the same characters as he wanted for his lead actors. “The first time I met Mayank he was actually reciting filthy poems in a gathering at a coffee shop,” he laughs.
