Indrani’s debut feature film Chhaad (one hour and 35 minutes) starring Paoli Dam and produced by National Film Development Corporation, has just been screened at Cannes Film Market 2022. “Cannes has a film market where the producer can book a screening and distributors and sales agents come. NFDC has plans to release it theatrically. One of my films had gone to an international festival in Germany, but not of this stature,” Indrani told The Telegraph. She has been “working for the past nearly 20 years” and her documentary Ladaakh Chale Rickshawala is a National Award winner. Several of her short films have gone to festivals too. She tells The Telegraph about the idea of Chhaad.
Is this a lockdown thought?
No, I had written this earlier. I had submitted the proposal at the beginning of 2019 and by the time we started shooting, it was January 2021. The story is about a woman whose access to the roof gets cut off. The roof is her sense of personal space and is a metaphor for our desire for internal freedom. When the door to the roof comes under lock and key, a crisis develops. She is a writer and a painter, but she is not able to do either. Eventually she realises that the lack of the roof was not the only crisis in her life. There is her relationship with her husband and her family. Everything seems okay, but it was somewhere latent, which she realises when she gets the roof back.
How did the idea come to you?
You can say, it’s derived from my personal experience and partly imagination. I have grown up in a house, or still stay in, which has a chilekotha room and was part of our existence. Then when we moved out of the house, we didn’t have access to the roof. So that sense of dom bondho kora byapar... then you make a story out of it.
We shot in north Calcutta. Her in-law’s place is in north Calcutta. Though I have grown up in south Calcutta, north Calcutta’r chhaader ekta onyo rokom character aache, which I wanted to explore. Sunlight doesn’t stream into her room. When she lost access to the roof, or aar prai aakash dekhar o jaoga nei.
So, there was a crisis in a relationship from which she was seeking liberation and which got manifested in the terrace...
Absolutely. Once the script was locked, I shot the way I wanted to. My cinematographer Subhadeep Dey contributed tremendously. I am seeing it with my inner eye, but to make it look like that, the cinematographer played an important role and he also helped me with those portions which I was not able to see.
Was Paoli Dam your first choice from the beginning?
Yes and had she not been free, I don’t know who else would I have shot with. She just fit the way I wanted the character to look and behave.
Who else stars in the film?
Paoli’s husband is played by Rahul Arunoday Banerjee. Anuradha Roy, Rajnandini Paul, Arindam Ganguly and Ranojoy Bishnu are there.
“The story is about a woman whose access to the roof gets cut off. The roof is her sense of personal space and is a metaphor for our desire for internal freedom. When the door to the roof comes under lock and key, a crisis develops. She is a writer and a painter, but she is not able to do either. Eventually she realises that the lack of the roof was not the only crisis in her life” — Indrani on Chhaad
Know Indrani:
Went to: G.D. Birla Centre for Education. Studied economics from Asutosh College and completed her Masters in economics from Calcutta University. She pursued MPhil in Development Studies from Institute of Development Studies and a film-making course from Chitrabani.
Fave film-makers: “Satyajit Ray is more classical. You can learn from his films. I love Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar and Meghe Dhaka Tara. I also love the works of Tapan Sinha, Asit Sen, Gulzar, Abbas Kiarostami and Akira Kurosawa,” she says.
Her Ladaakh Chale Rickshawala won the National Award for the Best Adventure Film, 2017.
Her short film in Bengali, Ekti Choto Chobi premiered at the Kalpanirjhar Short Fiction Film Festival, 2011, followed by Kolkata Short Film Festival, 2011.
Her documentary Destiny was screened at the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF), 2004.
She has also done the ‘Behind the Scenes — making of the film The Waiting City, ‘the first Australian film to be shot entirely in Kolkata’, starring Radha Mitchell, Joel Edgerton, Tillotama Shome and Samrat Chakrabarti, among others.