15 May,2011 07:30 AM IST | | Sowmya Rajaram
A young girl of Indian-origin is in the midst of a heated conversation with her parents at the dinner table. The bone of contention is a filmmaking course she wants to pursue at the New York Film Academy (NYFA). Her parents threaten to throw her out of the house if she insists on a "wasteful career" instead of doing what a respectable middle-class girl is expected to do -- become a "doctor, engineer or architect".
Director Rohit Gupta (right) with Director of Photography
Ravi Kumar
It's a scene at the heart of the conflict of Rohit Gupta's film, Life! Camera Action (LCA), and one that is likely to find an echo in many a middle-class Indian girl's hearts. It's also probably why the first-time director's 90 minute-long film has won 22 international accolades and awards.
"I'm honoured," is Gupta's simple response to us over email. An NYFA student himself, Gupta launched the film when Los Angeles-based screenplay writer and lyricist Amanda Sodhi, now co-writer of LCA, responded to an ad from him and emailed a 15-page screenplay based on what was required for his 15-minute NYFA assignment.
The story struck a chord. "She had gone with a female protagonist. We usually see men portrayed in these sort of roles, so I was curious to see how a woman would react, feel and look in such a situation," he recalls.u00a0Three and a half days, $30,000 and five months of postproduction and dubbing work later, the film was ready, in March 2009.
Protagonist Reina's struggles, as she goes about completing her NYFA film assignment while juggling two jobs and the demons of a fallout with her family and friends, found an echo in some people Gupta met while travelling with Another Day Another Life (ADAL), his first 5-minute film. "I heard the challenges they had to go through to complete their films.
I found that some people who had been in the industry for long had faced similar difficulties and it started to make me wonder why." That, and the approach to offbeat films like Love Sex aur Dhokha and Hyderabad Blues inspired him to go ahead with the project.
Where does LCA go now? "We have been invited for a screening by Asha for Education based out of San Francisco to be held in August 2011," he says.u00a0 The film has also been nominated for Best Feature Film in North America at the 2011 Swansea Bay Film Festival in Britain. And depending on response from distributors here, he hopes to bring it to India soon.
