Raghunath S has made a short film on autism. Titled Autsie, the film revolves around an autistic college student and the challenges he faces.
The film starts off in a first person narrative and goes well till, Autsie — the boy, is harassed and even beaten up by his peers to stop him from participating in a drumming competition.
His professor too is shown as being insensitive to his needs. Raghunath justifies that by saying, “True, the film has a lot of drama. I have even bollywood-ised the bullying, which may not be to the extent shown in the film, but it still exists. In fact that is how I discovered autism, when I overheard a few of my friends call someone with autism ‘mental’.”
That, says Raghunath, triggered his curiosity and he took off on an intense study of the subject and people affected by it.
“The script was first written as a love story between the boy and a girl he meets online. No matter how many people I contacted to produce the film, they wanted it to be more ‘filmy’. I did make a few changes that they demanded and still did not get any one to produce the film. Finally I produced it myself, but, by then it was too late to change anything,” says Raghunath.
He adds he is already working on a new script on the same subject and says this time the “film will be realistic and I will not compromise on the depiction or script.”
The protagonist in Autsie is a drummer and that comes across as authentic every time he plays the drums, as “Animesh Mishra who plays the lead is a drummer in real life too,” smiles Raghunath, who believes films are a powerful way to communicate with people about issues and create an awareness.
Autsie is his second film, his first being Water. The young director, started off as a journalist and after working for a couple of publications for six years, he quit his job and took to photography before zeroing in on films.
“I am attracted to the entire process of film-making — script writing (perhaps comes from my journalistic background), photography and editing.”
Currently Raghunath, who runs a video production company and creates video contents for corporate companies, says making short films is not easy either. “Budget is always a problem here and so is getting a location for a shoot. Specially for short films. Even for Autsie we struggled to get permission from colleges to shoot the film.”
Yet, that does not deter him. Soon he dreams of directing a full fledged feature film.
Autsie can be watched on YouTube
