Konkona Sen Sharma's directorial debut to premiere at TIFF

Konkona Sen Sharma's directorial debut, 'A Death in the Gunj', will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in the Special Presentation Section. "It's a great honour and I'm really excited. I was thrilled to get this beautiful email from Cameron Bailey (artistic director of the festival). It was like 'OMG! Somebody understands my film.' When I was writing it, I was so nervous and apprehensive, convinced that nobody would give me the money to make it," laughs Konkona who debuted as a director in 2006 at the Kala Ghoda Film Festival with her short film 'Naamkoron'.

The script, penned by the two-time National Award-winning actress ('Mr & Mrs Iyer', 'Omkara') herself, was one of the nine shortlisted by the National Film Development Corporation of India for their Script Lab and mentored by creative director Marten Rabarts. Konkona who is hard put to categorise her first feature as a director, says, "It's a human drama, a story of a family from Kolkata visiting retired parents settled in McCluskiegunj over a span of seven days," she says.
It revolves around Shyamal Chatterjee (Vikrant Massey), aka Shutu, a shy student who uses a road trip to the old Anglo-Indian town now in Jharkhand as an escape from his failed semester. In the week that follows, his quiet unravelling is initially overlooked by the family revellers, until the holiday ends with an implosion. "There's a lot of me in the film which is an amalgamation of personal experiences. It's a world I have grown up in. I spent a lot of my childhood in McCluskiegunj and there was a strong feeling of nostalgia while making the film," she admits.
McCluskiegunj, the Anglo-Indian Utopia that took birth with 300 families in the 1930s, began to fade by the late '70s with only 30 of the families remaining while others, post Independence, migrated to bigger cities, and some abroad, in search of better prospects, leaving the town to its original tribal inhabitants. Like the two marginalised groups' the Anglo- Indians and the Adivasis'who struggle to integrate with mainland India, the protagonist Shutu too, while belonging to neither, finds himself increasingly alienated from his own world.
Produced by Honey Trehan and Abhishek Chaubey who are making their debut as producers, and presented by Ashish Bhatnagar and Vijay T Swami, the film was wrapped up in just 31 days, an impossible task for most Bollywood filmmakers. "But this is not a fullfledged mainstream film so we didn't have the luxury of time or money. You get big budgets only when you have stars and this being my first film, I opted for brilliant actors. All the performers were extremely talented without me having to worry about any of them. We had workshops prior to the shoot when we got to know each other well and when in Ranchi we all lived together for a month," she reminisces. Besides Massey, the film features Ranvir Shorey, Tanuja, Om Puri, Kalki Koechlin, Tillotama Shome, Jim Saarbh and Gulshan Devaiah.
The shoot turned out to be a family holiday of sorts. Since his father Ranvir is also acting in the film, Konkona took her fiveyear-old son Haroon and his nanny along. And what was it like directing Ranvir? "He's a fine actor," smiles the actress who faced the camera for the first time at the age four and has done over 40 films in Hindi, Bengali and English since. She is the granddaughter of Chidananda Dasgupta, film historian, critic and cofounder of the Calcutta Film Society along with Satyajit Ray, and daughter of National Award winning actress-filmmaker Aparna Sen. Has her mother seen the film, "Yes, and she liked it apparently," smiles Konkona.
So what's the best thing about being a director? "I guess the fact that you can create your own world. Right now though I'm struggling to finish the post production in time for the September unveiling in Toronto," she says.