It’s back to the old days of the travelling talkies, with stories new.
Director Sandeep Mohan is taking his second feature film Hola Venky through the “travelling cinema” route — he’s literally carrying a projector, his film on Blue Ray, and a screen, to people’s doorstep, and interacting directly with his audience. Who wants to battle traffic to get to a multiplex? It’s another new branch off of the Indie movie surge in the country.
His journey begins in Bangalore, which apparently is the new test market for everything.
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Kerala-born and Mumbai-settled Sandeep’s maiden film
Hola Venky , says the director, is much deeper than what the basic plot suggests — “a journey from the groin to the heart” when the hero loses a part of his sexual organ. “It’s about what it means to be a man today. It questions our notions of masculinity, macho-ness… There is nothing wrong with sex! I mean when friends sit down to talk, or there’s a corporate crowd sitting around for a chat, it’s a subject no one minds talking about. It’s not such a touchy topic, and this is how you talk in the real world,” says Sandeep.
Shot in Guerrilla mode in English, Hindi, Spanish, Tamil, the 85-minute film was made in San Francisco and Mumbai with a three-member crew — Sandeep, the cameraman, and the sound recordist. “We used a Canon 5D camera, and two lapel mikes… no boom mikes even,” he laughs. Except for the lead pair — Roger Narayan and Sonia Balcazar — all actors were techies, friends, and friends of friends. Sandeep’s friend Giju John put in five lakhs, hosted the crew in his home in the U.S. The cost of post-production, another 4.8 lakhs, came from crowd-sourcing through Facebook and a campaign on the fundraising platform, Indiegogo.
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The film releases in theatres in the U.S. on January 25, and in the video on demand format in India on February 24, where you pay per view.
It sounds a bit jarring though, to know that Sandeep’s been an assistant director before with Sanja Leela Bhansali on one of his grand big-budget productions Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam . “I love love stories. Hola Venky is also a love story. But love doesn’t have to be one way alone. Love has many shades to it. After HDDCS I got lost in that world a bit… I worked in an ad agency, wrote TV scripts…”
The whole idea of taking cinema to people came when he was sitting at a coffee café in Mumbai. He felt these guys milling around him were the ones he wanted to show the film to. “That’s when I thought of the travelling cinemas in villages…those that were screened at the end of the day during religious festivals. Such a thing hasn’t happened in urban spaces. Office is the new temple everyone goes to…so I thought why not take my films to workplaces? I wanted to democratise movie watching… the audience can tell me on my face how my movie was.”