I’m a product of two very different worlds and I wanted to tell a story that would combine them,” filmmaker Subhadra Mahajan tells us when we ask her of the genesis of her debut feature Second Chance which premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last year and is gearing for a theatrical release on June 13. Mahajan, “a Pahari kid”, was born and raised in Himachal and spent a large part of her childhood in the Kullu Valley where the film is shot, only later adopting the life of a city person as she settled in Mumbai for higher studies and work. In her new film, faced with a sudden crisis, a 20-something protagonist Nia (Dheera Johnson), an urbanite, escapes to her family’s summer home in the hills only to gradually open herself up to the people and ways of the Himalayan winter life.      

The film’s primary location, a quaint, lonesome house where Nia heals and re-centres herself, assumes the significance of a character in the film. A house in Manali, known locally as the Birla house, was chosen in favour of initial suggestions to use Mahajan’s own home in Shimla for the shoot (“Shimla feels like a city”). “It was a miracle that the house was left pretty much the way it is [in the film] and it’s got a huge orchard estate surrounding it, which means that there’s not a lot of construction. So, it feels like a bit of a time capsule,” says Mahajan. Its remoteness helped to build the film’s soundscape, adds cinematographer Swapnil S Sonawane, known for his work on Sacred Games and films like Monica O My Darling, Newton, and Superboys of Malegaon.

Subhadra Mahajan and Swapnil S Sonawane