Trial By Fire fame Rajshri Deshpande, whose film Privacy recently made it to the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan) in South Korea, sees film festivals as “learning spaces”, the actress said in a recent media interaction.
“BiFan is one of the world’s best genre film festivals. Being part of this festival in itself was a huge honour for us. Film festivals are learning spaces for me. I interacted with different genre filmmakers at BiFan. How we struggled to reach there doesn’t matter because you know you are a part of something which is so beautiful,” said Rajshri, who had also garnered positive reviews for her acting in the Netflix series Sacred Games.
Rajshri plays Roopali Naik, a Mumbai Police surveillance expert, in New York-based Indian-origin filmmaker Sudeep Kanwal’s debut film Privacy. Talking about building the character of Roopali, she said, “I had to build Roopali from four to five different spaces because I didn’t know anyone like her personally. It was of course a challenging space because it was not a very good space to be in as a person. It’s a grey shade.”
“I feel there are many journeys like Roopali and I think we as a society should empathetically look at people so nobody goes through what Roopali goes through,” added Rajshri.
Privacy’s festival journey started on a dramatic note when the team travelling from Mumbai to South Korea experienced a six-hour flight delay. Talking about the incident, director Sudeep Kanwal said, “Our team changed their clothes at the airport in five minutes. They had to hop in a cab with the driver not understanding English. But they managed to reach the venue 30 seconds before the cut-off time for the red-carpet event.”
Privacy is a social thriller based in Mumbai and tries to address the issue of how privacy is compromised through the gaze of surveillance cameras. Talking about the inception of the film, Sudeep said, “The very first image I had in my head was that of this lonely girl looking at several screens and watching people. But the real genesis was when I was in Mumbai for another project. I read articles on how the Mumbai surveillance project was getting a reboot.”
Sharing his thoughts about privacy in our lives and why he chose to tell his story through surveillance cameras, Sudeep said, “Privacy is not talked about much in India. I don’t know why it’s just accepted that it's okay for people to be in each other’s space. It’s okay if the cameras are out there, they are for our safety. No one looks at the other side of things like how it could be manipulated and used against you. So, I wanted to talk about privacy. I think it’s just the surveillance, the language of it, it’s more visual and that’s why I wanted to do it with surveillance cameras.”
When asked about her take on respecting privacy and maintaining boundaries with celebrities, Rajshri said, “It’s a very tricky area because of the way everything works. A lot of times, it is paid also. Like, Spot Me.”
“A lot of times, people don’t know what is paid and what is not. But I think the person who is stalking or taking a picture or sharing a WhatsApp message or looking at something viral and discussing it, needs to understand what he wants to do with that information,” concluded Rajshri.
After BiFan, Privacy will travel to multiple film festivals with Cinequest in San Jose being its next stop. The film will release in India after completing its festival run.
