Ask me if I would have agreed to get onboard if at first the script had come to my table, and the answer would be ‘no’,” says Deepti Chawla.

We are talking about The Shameless, the one that Calcutta girl Anasuya Sengupta carries on her slim shoulders — or much of it, to be fair — right up to a height that India had not reached so far. People are abuzz about the country’s rich haul at Cannes 2024,
and why not. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, Chidananda S. Naik’s Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know and Konstantin Bojanov’s The Shameless bagged the top honours.

Here’s the ringside view from Chawla, the executive producer of The Shameless. Four days after the awards ceremony, she speaks to The Telegraph over Zoom from her Mumbai home.

When did she first hear about The Shameless winning the top actress award?

“I heard it when everyone else did,” she chuckles. “The festival tells you only during the award ceremony who the winners are.” Chawla had left the day the awards were to be announced. As had Bojanov, the film’s Bulgarian director.

However, feelers were felt, fingers and toes crossed. “We were getting calls from the organisers asking who all were still around. And I thought — Wow, this is the first time they want to know if we are still there! I felt something was coming up.” She had also gone around asking people if they had watched the film and what they made of it. “And most of them said, ‘Oh! It’s impossible to get the tickets, it’s so full’. We had about four screens and all were booked. Payal’s film too was chock-a-block. I heard ‘India’ everywhere — imagine that when you are competing with Francis Ford Coppola!”

The Shameless probably has had one of the longest development periods in recent times. Bojanov’s project took germ 14 years ago when he set eyes on some short stories by William Dalrymple. From the idea of making a documentary to making an adult animation, from Covid-19 to finding finance, and scouting for locales and cast, it finally reached fruition as a love story of two women in trying circumstances.

Chawla says, “Cannes is such a funny place, it’s buzzing with business deals, frankly, while there’s a festival going on. The Shameless was so big — the photocalls, meetings with the festival directors, dinners... everybody wanted to catch up on the screenings.”

For many, it is a relief that this year Cannes has meant a lot more than billowy gowns and endless fashion columns. But as Chawla will tell you from her experiences at the NFDC, IFFI, Disney Studios India, Torino Film Lab, etc., every bit is necessary. “The kinds of cinema that festivals show are so meaningful that if it takes brands, fashion or red carpets and glamour, I will do that.”

Cannes means business. This year, the festival sold a record 15,000 Marche badges up from last year’s 13,500. Marche is French for market, the badges are registrations for business professionals.

Talking about her own place in the chain of financing for The Shameless, the first part of the funding came from Bojanov’s home country Bulgaria. Then from Switzerland, then France, then Taiwan. “And still there was a little gap. When I got to know about the project, I also learnt that it’s a story set in India. And to my surprise, that it’s in Hindi!
How bad can it be? There’s a Hindi film out there, looking for partners and an Indian has not come onboard? For me, it was the perfect opportunity.”

Chawla was in Berlin in February-March when all the information came around. She says, “With co-producing there’s a difference; you’re part of the journey of owning the film in a specific way. It was not before March that I saw the rough cut of the film… and I was blown!”

Chawla would like to call it a thriller. “The protagonist — Renuka, played by Sengupta — has committed a murder and is always on the run.” Sex workers, lesbian love, murder… it’s not easy to pull off a story like that. The film does shine, despite Sengupta not flashing her big smile even once.

Back to Chawla’s initial statement — that she would not have agreed to join the team if she had read the script initially. She says, “I doubt any Indian producer would have... It’s a difficult film, one may find it tough to imagine the treatment at the script stage.”

The big question. Are we going to watch The Shameless in theatres in India? “We are waiting; right now we are getting rave reviews and that’s the journey we need to cover,” is her measured reply. Prod her a bit more and she says, “There definitely is a lot of curiosity now that it has won such a major award. We certainly have a talking point but still need to go through the festival route and get more vibe about it, wait for it to become bigger, get more people onboard so that we can release it. After all, releasing a film is a business call.”

And then she says it like it is. “It is also my dream to see Payal’s film in big theatres, people flocking to it and saying, ‘Dekhen to zara, ki yeh ladkiyon ne kiya kya hai’.”