Ekta Kapoor’s ‘Shorr’ at 2010 MIAAC Film Festival
Mumbai is about grit, drama, passion – and the luck of the draw. The new movie ‘Noise/Shorr’ follows three very different lives during the frenzy of the Ganesh Chaturti Festival in the city – and finally these disparate stories come together in the gripping climax. ‘Shorr’ embodies the high energy the city is famous for and keeps you thoroughly engaged. And indeed Mumbai is a central character in the film, around which the various tales are interwoven.
After the premiere of ‘Shorr’ at the MIAAC Film Festival in New York, there was the opportunity to meet the cast and crew. The film is produced by Alt Entertainment, a division of Balaji Motion Pictures headed by Ekta Kapoor, and which recently produced the runaway success ‘Love, Sex aur Dhokha.’
As Somi Roy, Festival Director, observed, “It evolved from a short film – filmmaking is such a collaborative effort and we’ve been able to follow the genesis and evolution of this film since 2008 when ‘Shorr’ won the best short film at the MIAAC Festival.”
For Indian-Americans, the story has some interesting sub-text, as both filmmakers, Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, are from the US. Many film-goers will remember their first film ‘Flavors’, and their first Hindi film ‘99’ which became a big box-office hit in India.
I had interviewed them back in 2003 when they were new filmmakers, fresh from making ‘Flavors’ and it’s interesting to see how careers turn out and how some prophecies come true.
The two had gone to engineering school in India together and at that time told me, “Among the things we shared in common was a huge passion for the movies. So a few years after we came to the US as software consultants, it was the most natural thing for us to translate that passion onto celluloid reality. Films are our school. All we talk about is films – at work, at home, on e-mail, over the phone, anywhere, anytime. That’s all we want to do. We even plan to quit software soon!”
Software’s loss is cinema’s gain and ‘Noise/Shorr’ is their latest, a feature film version of the winner of MIAAC 2008’s Best Short Film. From short to feature film has been quite a journey.
“We wrote the script for the feature first and while we were waiting to make it we took a small incident from it and made a short,” says Krishna DK. “We took just one entire sequence from the film about three boys who find a bomb on the local train and decide go and have a blast. We experimented and tried various things with it. The film was selected for MIAAC and won an award. That made it much easier for the feature film to become a reality.”
Sendhil Ramamurthy in ‘Shorr’ at MIAAC
The other US connection is that the film stars Sendhil Ramamurthy who is so well-known to New York audiences, through the TV series ‘Heroes’ and ‘Covert Affairs.’ At the premiere, Sendhil spoke about how he had been looking for just the right project to take him to India but didn’t like any of the roles he was being offered. Then he had breakfast with Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK and saw their short film which was just 14 minutes long.
“I was blown away by it – just the way it was shot you could see their sensibilities,” he recalls. ““I didn’t read the script before I said yes. I wanted to see what it was like to make an Indian film with an Indian crew – and it was an amazing experience for me. It’s one I hope to repeat.”
AT MIAAC, the Shorr, the people of the City
One of the pleasant surprises of the film is Tusshar Kapoor’s endearing portrayal of Tilak, the small-time, good hearted crook. It’s a gritty, honest performance and when he’s on the screen he kind of takes it over. He recalls, “The film had so many tracks but they come together so intelligently. There was not a moment of confusion – it can get complicated but just the way it’s written, it just brings a lot of clarity and interesting thinking, when you see the film. The scenes were very clear in their minds – they were two directors but they knew exactly what they want.”
The film is written by Raj Nidimoru and DK Krishna, along with Sita Menon who is based in Mumbai. She says it was quite a collaborative effort with all three working on three different laptops at the same time, with a lot of discussion, and the process was lots of fun.
The movie moves from action to black comedy to heist and one wonders how all these different genres found their way into the story. She says, “On any given day there are at least ten stories in the newspapers that would catch your eye – these were germs of ideas that we got – the main effort was to weave it all into a cohesive story that was fun and entertaining.”
Besides the strong performances by Sendhil Ramamurthy and Tusshar Kapoor, there are realistic, earthy performances by a cast of relative unknowns, but each contributing to the realism of the story. Nikhil Dwivedi, Pitobash Tripathi, Sundeep Kishan, Preeti Desai (Miss Britain), Radhika Apte, Girija Oak and Amit Mistry are the players in this eclectic cast.
As Raj says, “What we loved about them was the rawness, the enthusiasm with which they portrayed these characters. So at the end of it , we tried to pick even the smallest characters who are real.”
Indeed, small lives lived in the cacophony of the big city are caught perfectly in ‘Shorr’. As a member of the audience put it, “I’m from Bombay and the movie really spoke to me at so many different levels.” That was the intent of the filmmakers for as Raj Nidimoru says, they were overwhelmed by the noise, the visuals, and the smells of the city.
Sitting in an auto rickshaw in the frenetic traffic of Mumbai, they were edged between a man in a Mercedes Benz and three people squeezed together on a motorbike; three strata of society existing side by side. They were intrigued by the juxtaposition of very different lives: “For a filmmaker when you see that, you want to build your story around it. Inspiration was provided by the stories that you see in newspapers every day – slightly unbelievable sometimes but that’s how it is, that’s how the city is. We wanted to make observational commentary on the city, yet make it entertaining for people. The movie goes through a couple of genres – it’s been a joy-ride!”
The joyride has paid off big time – ‘Shorr’ – the feature film – bagged Best Direction award for the two filmmakers at the MIACC 2010 Film Festival. Earlier it was shown at the Pusan Film Festival in Korea to critical acclaim. And the story is not yet quite over as the directors call this 114 minute festival cut ‘a work in progress’ and it will still evolve into the movie film-goers will finally get to see in March-April 2011.
(c) Lavina Melwani
Related Article: Ekta Kapoor – Eating Her Cake and Having it Too
1 Comment
Loved the film! Great write up on the film Lavina. I was present for the post screening discussion and this is exactly what they said. Shor is breaking the ground in many ways!