It takes 25 directors in 5 continents to make a film

MUMBAI: It is exactly the kind of thing some channels would have called ‘breaking news’—a backpack travels the world on its own. Two years ago, the globe-trotting green military backpack in question even made a stopover outside a mall in Andheri. Here, it hopped on to a bullock cart which, incidentally, was being driven by an upcoming Bollywood actor.Obviously, this wasn’t a spontaneous journey. The itinerary of the backpack in fact had been carefully charted by 25 filmmakers in 13 countries across five continents, most of whom have never met each other.
The Owner—a hundred-minute multi-lingual film featuring a green backpack in the lead—which premieres worldwide on Friday, is the result of a first-of-its-kind collaborative effort helmed by Detroit-based producers Marty Shea and Ian Bonner. In 2010, they enlisted around 25 directors found through filmmaker forums for this unique project, whose trailer begins with the shot of a woman who is desperate to own a backpack that she spots in a magazine. This leads to a mysterious journey spanning several countries and languages. The promo finally ends with the close-up of a psychic, who says: “The bag must be returned to its owner.”
During the making of this film, which will now replace Paris, Je T’Aime in the Guinness Book of World Records as the film with the most number of directors, Shea and Bonner entrusted the directors (including five from India) with various filmmaking responsibilities ranging from raising funds and writing to directing their own five-minute segment and promoting the film.
Film-makers shun Indian landmarks, cliches
In a unique project, 25 directors have collaborated on a transcontinental film. The film-makers would upload their videos and scripts online to gather feedback and alter their material accordingly. At this point, various ideas including one in which the backpack falls from the sky with the Eiffel tower in the backdrop, were toyed with and vetoed in favour of continuity.
As the singular, unifying physical element, the backpack assumes the pedestal of a metaphor in the film and comes to stand for various emotions in different situations. In the Mumbai segment, for instance, which shows Kahaani actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui playing the part of the bullock cart driver, “the backpack becomes his way of coming to terms with a personal loss”, says Neha Raheja Thakker who shot the sequence. “Manoeuvering the bullock cart and getting it into the frame took time,” recalls Thakker, who has always been enchanted by the urban sight of the bullock cart—“an outdated vehicle still used to ferry construction materials for modern buildings.”
Predictably, such idiosyncracies of each invidual director showed up in the form of varying colour preferences, choice of camera angles and other more subtle biases. But at the editing table, these were smoothened out to ensure a certain coherence. Several scenes were reshot, dubbed and fused with a common background score. In the Noida segment, for example, the character is shown walking towards an accident scene. “When we uploaded the video, the others felt that his gait was too casual given the gravity of the situation,” says Prashant Sehgal, who joined the project as a production manager. “So we reshot it and I ended up playing a body double for the actor as he could not make it,” recalls Sehgal.
While the directors have instinctively avoided prominent Indian landmarks and cliches in their respective sequences, certain on-location moments turned out to be unavoidably Indian. Sehgal recalls the shoot of the accident scene where the sight of a man lying on the road with fake blood splattered all over his body “ended up scaring an old woman who came running to the site and screamed at us when she discovered it was just a film shoot”.