Film on cultural intolerance premiers at city festival

Kolkata: An 18-minute English

film

about the growing cultural intolerance all over the world was premiered at the ongoing South Asian Short Film Festival in the city on Tuesday. Titled ‘The Disguise’, the film was earlier selected for the Best Shorts Competition in California and The Bozeman Film Festival in Montana.

Set in London, the film narrates the personal story of two women and the subsequent choices they make because of the growing cultural insensitivity all around. Director of the film, Sandeep A Varma, said he was drawn to the story because of its “intimate” nature and “shelf life”. An engineer by qualification with an MBA degree, Varma has already directed a feature film titled ‘Manjunath’.

“When you live in a large multi-racial megalopolis, how much should you blend in and to what extent can you stand out? This premise of ‘The Disguise’ — the subtle war between the ‘native’ and ‘migrant’ — attracted me,” Varma said.

The crowd-funded short film, featuring Naomi Willow and Adriana Grigoriev, has been written by Riya Mukherjee, who is a music/radio consultant and a writer and original content creator. Talking about the project, which she produced as well, Mukherjee said, “The film is about the lives of two Londoners. While one is conservative, the other is assimilated into the western world. One day, a hate crime on the road forces them to rethink their concepts of identity.” The film has been deliberately left open-ended with both Varma and Mukherjee insisting on not attempting to arrive at any definitive answers.

On being asked why she chose to pen the script after 23 years of her work in broadcasting and music programming, Mukherjee said she had earlier worked on innovative films either as a conceptualiser, co-writer, lyricist or creative producer. Notable among them have been short films titled ‘The Virgins’, ‘Kahanibaaz’ and ‘Baarish’ and the feature film titled ‘Good Morning Sunshine’.

“The story of ‘The Disguise’ is very visual. Besides, it isn’t a story that can be told on the radio,” Mukherjee said.

Another very conscious choice was to set the film in London. “I could have shot it outside my house since all I needed was a bus stop. But I deliberately wanted to set it in a megalopolis in the western world because I didn’t want the exotic third world problem tag. I needed Caucasians to be cast. I needed to draw attention to the fact that this is no longer just happening in our backyard,” she concluded.