A short film made largely by theatre enthusiasts in Bengaluru has just struck gold, and is being lapped up by prestigious film festivals the world over. The film Playgrounds was at the 21st Incubator for Film and Visual Media in Asia (IFVA) at the Hong Kong Arts Centre where it won the gold in the Asian New Force category. The film has also been selected for the 14th Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles.
Playgrounds is a great example of friends sharing a common vision coming together to make an indie film, pulling favours from friends and achieving what they want at low budgets. They started with what they thought was a pretty common premise in India — a child getting lost.
M.D. Pallavi Arun, a popular sugama sangeeta singer, and theatre and TV actor teamed up with classmate Shamik Sen Gupta, an advertising consultant and filmmaker. They had been to film school together in Sweden and decided later on to make this film based on their shared aesthetic and ideas. Set in Bengaluru, the multilingual film (Kannada, Tamil and Dakhni) was shot mostly at night, with very little artificial lighting, and sometimes even guerrilla style. The film is written, directed and edited by the duo. It’s Pallavi’s first film and Shamik’s third.
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“The story is set in the larger context of migrant workers in the construction industry, different classes of people and their conflict. India’s cities are growing rapidly — office complexes and apartment buildings are springing up everywhere. Building these behemoths is a migrant workforce of unskilled labourers coming from the hinterlands. Ironically, the men and women who build these habitats for the migrant upwardly mobile middleclass, themselves live in dark shanties beneath the towers,” Shamik observes.
“The story revolves around a labourer’s child who tries to hide and falls asleep in an auto. The auto driver discovers the child and sets about trying to return her to the parents,” says Pallavi. A lot of methodical work went into making the film, to keep it as real as possible. After working on the script for about three months, they auditioned theatre actors for the roles — actors from Ninasam and BLT feature, as well as Pallavi herself, and her mother Gowri Dattu, who runs a theatre school. They then rehearsed for 15 days, worked with language coaches, and shot the film in seven days, Pallavi recalls the process. The film was shot in real locations in the city — suburban roads, low-income neighbourhoods, streets, hospital, construction sites, and workers’ shanties.
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