By Stanzin Raghu

  1. TO NOSTALGIC BEGINNINGS AND EX-LOVERS

A few days back, when I realized I had an opportunity to share my/our filmmaking journey of ‘Ayynoorum Ayynthum (500 & 5)’, an Independent Tamil Anthology feature film on this blog, I was a little unsure. Because how do you talk about, no, how do you even start about an intense ex-lover whom you had very painfully but successfully detached from and let go? Bear with me for romanticizing this just a tiny bit. It’s not easy being stoic, matter-of-fact and objective when you’ve spent 4 years with a film. After more than a year of making the film (2011-2012) and another 3 years of running around trying to get the film distributed, and finally (after a painful but epiphanic realization) releasing the film Online for Free on Youtube, it’s safe to say we’ve seen a bit of life.

The thing was, over the years, so many Indie filmmakers were narrating their stories of struggle and challenges and talked about their scars from their filmmaking battles and it felt as if their struggles were validated by talking about it in blogs. In fact, some of their stories were just so identical to what had been happening to us, I don’t even have to write about those parts. And reading about them was sort of a vicarious affirmation for us. But now when it comes to writing about our journey, what can I say differently when almost anything and everything about the struggle of Indie filmmaking has been already written? So I know that what I share now is not going to be something new or ground-breaking or unheard of. And if I had written this article maybe a year ago, this article would have been a bit more dramatic. Anyways, we can only hope someone out there connects with this and is able to feel reassured — because all our struggles are the same but only different, in the subjective realities our films are set in.

  1.  THE INCEPTION

Between 2005 and 2010, we, the 4 of us at Accessible Horizon Films (which is more of a film collective than a production company), had made a few short films and documentaries while in New York, which went on to be screened at various film festivals around the world in LA, New York, Germany and India. Making documentaries and shorts were only the first steps in figuring out what this mystery of filmmaking is. We had already been bitten by the bug. Also while working in TV, I was gobbling up a lot of fiction, non-fiction, alternative magazines and books on narrative filmmaking. With my ‘press’ pass I would go to various Film festivals and sit through 20 to 30 films a week. With all this ‘upload’, I felt I was going to explode from the inside and was at a place, where I figured I had to stop ingesting and start creating and releasing. Documentaries and experimental shorts were one thing, but a narrative feature? It was something of a holy grail. I had read up so many things on Independent/Guerilla/alternative filmmaking that if I had read any further, I’d have been programmed to remain one of those zombie-ish, aspiring wannabes, who’d never get their feet wet.

So by then, I had written 2 feature-length screenplays (one was a fantasy ‘Hollywood Blockbuster’ in which James Franco was going to star – yes, in my head there was absolutely no doubt he would say yes and rake in 10 million dollars – and another socio-political drama in Tamil) both of which I pitched around to various people in LA and Chennai. Because apparently that’s how you went through the rites of passage and that’s where dreams came true. A year went by. Nothing happened. But the first validation for me as a writer came when the Tamil script was selected as a top ten finalist at the IFFLA (Indian Film Festival at Los Angeles) film fund development program in 2010. That was also the year the 4 of us decided to quit our jobs and lives in the land of the so-called American dream and come back to India. Some kind of a strange calling. We had saved up just enough money to last us for a couple of years (that is, if we were minimalist in our lifestyle, which we were).

And slowly, when we tried to get our film made the conventional find-a-producer-and-all-that way, we figured one thing – that we had to pound our heads against this giant wall of ‘cinematic’ hype and red tape relentlessly. And we did that, for quite a bit. We tried to muster up every muscle to go against this industry wall and guess what? That wasn’t the best way to do it, especially when you aren’t equipped with deep pockets or got a surname that can assemble a roster of deep pockets. And then, we thought: okay, there must be something really screwed up with this approach of meeting the gatekeepers in ‘power’ who would recognize ‘greatness’ in our vision and entrust us with big wads of cash and give us the green-light to make our big feature debut. Personally too, I was blissfully delusional and had this sense of entitlement. But slowly and increasingly, it was becoming evident. Yes, that wasn’t gonna happen.

Then we asked ourselves, do we keep waiting for that elusive ‘break’ and wallow in the rant-after-rant that’s usually associated with filmmaking? Or…do we muster up the chutzpah to do what we want to do? So what if there’s no external green-light? No one to tell you what to do and how to do ‘your’ kind of things? What if there are no rules? I mean, typically, the moment you begin to rely on external factors, you create a situation where you are stuck amidst rules and stuff. Why not NOT do that? Put yourself in this free space-time creative continuum. Travel any direction you want and any speed you want. You dictate it all. Obviously, when you don’t have the reality (budget) to go with it, create your own reality and make it all up as you go. So that’s that. We wanted to face our fears. We didn’t want to wait.

And there was also this ‘need’ to tell a story (which I still think is the bed-rock of all filmmaking). But essentially, the point being, we had to create, no matter what. So this project’s outcome is the result of a gnawing need to create something. Something out of this vacuum.

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  1. THE MAKING OF A MONSTER…

The Concept

It was an evening, the tail-end of 2010. We were sitting together and ranting about how money was the one thing that stopped us from making our film. Because we were all generally conditioned by the notion that you need crores of rupees to make a film. The more we talked about money, the more it seemed like money was the Hero or rather, the Anti-hero in this whole shebang. And that’s how the thematic core of ‘Ayynoorum Ayynthum (500 & 5)’ came about. Yes, our film would be about money, more specifically, a 500-rupee note, that would travel through 5 remarkably different characters. And what happens to those characters when the 500 is with them briefly forms the crux of the film. We figured later that we would do it as independent short films, like an anthology. And until then, we really weren’t sure about the format of the film. It developed organically. Making shorter segments made it seem manageable. No real pressure to create a masterpiece and such.

Writing like a Madman

Now that we had locked down the concept, I shut myself inside my room and set to work. For 15 zoom-blurry days, I wrote and wrote and wrote. What they call a stream of consciousness or whatever. I didn’t stop, I couldn’t. From FADE IN to FADE out. All 90 pages of it. My personal best in terms of speed, because earlier I used to take months to write a script. The script was finalized and greenlit (by us, mind you) in the first week of February, 2011. Of course, the incubation process (ranting) helped and constant tweaking was done to the finished script till the shooting stage.

Money and your Mouth

When it came to raising funds, we knew at that point that we had to do it ourselves. Put our money where our mouths were. We had a sizeable (according to us) chunk of our collective savings from the US. And apart from that, we called up a few of our partners in crime. Our old friends who had seen us making films earlier. Without hesitation, they said they would support us. Some loaned us the money (which we returned later after 2 years) and some just gave it away, saying they only wanted us to make the film and ‘succeed’. We didn’t even have a crowd-funding campaign. How many friends like that can you boast of? Okay, now that the money part was taken care of, we had to figure out how to create the monster.

DIY – The Godsend

We knew we had to keep our costs low. And we had a major advantage. Technically, we were more than reasonably prepared, at least for this undertaking. All those years of experimenting with technology and self-learning came to our rescue. Youtube tutorials were our bible. All those indie-filmmaking forums were our consultants. That’s when we discovered we can Do-It-Yourself (DIY) anything. By mid-February 2011, we had started fabricating/designing and mechanically creating various equipment ourselves because we couldn’t afford to rent out from high-end production houses. This was pre-production to pre-production. With help from Youtube tutorials, local blacksmiths, carpenters and mechanical workshop technicians, our team over-saw and managed this entire mechanical process. It helps when you have a mechanical engineer/cinematographer in your team. We hand-created Steadicams, Wheel-cam rigs, a track dolly and a table-top dolly from scratch for real cheap but of awesome quality. For example, we made our customized Steadicam for a mere Rs. 5000 when the ‘rental cost’ of a professional Steadicam is Rs. 10,000 per day in Chennai.

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Casting

Our first plan when we talked about the concept (before even scripting), was to just focus on 5 characters and have a couple of extra characters so that we could control the budget. But as I wrote the script, I wrote it unhinged, not worrying about anything except the story. By the time the production script was ready and the casting process began, we realized there were close to 90 characters. Shit. Yes, for an independent film, it was a bit too much. But then, we were bulldozing through.

Casting and auditions took us about a month or so. Our good friend, who’s an Art Gallery owner, was kind enough to give us her space for the auditions. For most of the main characters, we cast mainly theatre actors who had also done some film work. For the secondary roles, we cast actors and mostly non-actors, our friends and their friends. For some characters, finding the right actors was a challenge. And if we did, they would not turn up. Some would agree to do the role but would disappear at the last moment without any notice when the entire production was set up. Integrity was quite a rare commodity. So we learned to have back-ups and improvise. Every step was a hard lesson.

Technical prep

Before we started production, we knew we were going digital (as if we had another choice). Some in the industry warned us that films shot in digital would not even be looked at by distributors. They warned us about problems with image quality when projected. So we compared the test footage of the Canon 7D (then costed around $1800) footage to the Sony EX1 (around $6000) on the big screen at Real Image Chennai, and there was no contest. The 7D’s image quality was far superior to the EX1’s. That’s how we decided to go with the 7D and its cousin, the 5D. But as with any new technology, we had to understand its limitations and then work it to our advantage. We rented some lenses, borrowed some and bought a couple. Lighting was a bit deliberate. We bought some lights for specific scenes (for the Jenny segment because we had to create a noir-ish effect), improvised with natural lighting at other places. In some places, lack of proper lighting added to the mood of the scenes. So we were happy.

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Locations and other challenges

We shot in three cities. Chennai, Bangalore and Pondicherry. Except for a few locations, we didn’t get permits for most of the others. It was run and gun. One production manager we hired took his advance money, showed us a couple of shitty places and disappeared. Disappearing acts are very common apparently. Con artists galore.

At one point, we accidentally shot in a defence area without a permit and inadvertently told a Police officer in mufti to vacate the shooting spot. And once we realized, we had to pacify him and request him to let us go. That cost us a couple of hours on a very tightly scheduled day. But we survived. In some busy city locations, we would hide in the trunk of our tiny production car to avoid gathering crowds. The actors would do their thing as if they were real people. It helped that they weren’t famous. Some scenes were shot with only 2 or 3 people while some scenes with more than 30 people. It was madness.

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  1. YOU AND WHAT ARMY?!

We initially thought we’d have just 5 to 10 people on board so that we could keep it simple and stick to the low budget we had. And so the molding began. What started out to be a project with a small scope slowly and organically evolved into something with over a 100 people on board in various capacities. Sure, nothing came easy and we realized we had to push this forward by sheer grit alone. Someone I knew used to say, “Work with people who are smarter than you” because with an ambitious vision at stake, you can’t possibly get into it thinking you’re the best brain. The four of us, in our core team, knew how to do stuff, understood the process, but we weren’t the best at everything. Before we started production, we thought we had to hire only experienced film industry technicians and crew to get this made, because obviously this has to turn out damn good, right? And we did, but slowly things were falling apart for various reasons, mainly the comfort factor, for a project as unconventional as ours and also, experienced doesn’t necessarily mean smarter especially with our use of more contemporary technology. For example, with a conventional film camera, you have lenses that are compatible with standard follow-focus rings that let you to easily manipulate the focus while in motion but with our use of DSLRs we didn’t have that luxury, so we had to use lenses without the follow-focus rings, which was quite a challenge.

A traditionally experienced cameraman initially came on board with spiel after spiel of how he was the right man for the job but the day before shooting started, he bailed out, apparently not being to able to handle the challenges of Indie production. None of that mattered because just as how things were falling apart during production with an ‘experienced’ union crew, they just kept reassembling back together with ‘inexperienced crew’, because all that mattered for them was the passion or just hanging out with friends and having shit-loads of fun. One thing we realized was, no matter what, the people that you are most comfortable with, are the ones you’re going to be working with if you’re going to make a film (which usually takes months or years of your life). It’s not about experience or hiring union or whatever. So within us, we had to learn stuff and ‘upgrade’ and get smarter & bring more adaptable people on board who understood what we were trying to do. Also, we had to resort to DIY (Do-it-yourself) filmmaking most of the time figuring out how to create things from scratch. So basically, the point is to create a team of adaptable, understanding people (even if you’re a crew of just one or two) if you want your production to go smoothly.

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  1. POST-PRODUCTION

In hindsight, production was only one third of the marathon. Shooting in and around cities (Chennai, Bangalore and Pondicherry) was way too cluttered and noisy. For post, we decided to stay far away from all the noise in an ancient house with a long hallway in a little village a few hours from Chennai. The only sounds we could hear was that of cows, goats and birds. We set up our edit suite amidst all that and set to work. That was also the time when power cuts were frequent in Tamil Nadu. But we managed with a broken Inverter and timed our edit sessions in between the power cuts.

It took us about 3 to 4 months to edit and lock down the picture to about 2 hours and odd minutes. I personally did the rough cut to 3 hours and my team finished it up and brought it to 2-something. Simultaneously, we also started composition of the songs. We have 1 theme song which is sort of a folk number, another, a sort of montage-based slow romantic song and 1 poem which is recited as neither a song nor a poem. The songs were done by our musician cousins, a duo who were experienced in traditional/classical music and folks arts. The narrative background score was done by our old friend who was a music composer, who had worked with some big studios in Chennai.

Once these were set in motion, we got back to Chennai and hired a dubbing studio which proved to be quite expensive. And obviously, we couldn’t arrange to get in so many of cast members into that studio because the hours were increasing. So again, we got into our DIY mode and set up a dubbing studio in Pondicherry from scratch where we got in our actors to come to Pondicherry in their own time. Dubbing alone took us 1-and-a-half months to complete. For the color correction/Digital Intermediate (DI) process, we set up our own unit, painted the wall of an empty room white and used it as our big screen monitor.

We did the DCP (Digital Cinema Package) Mastering at Real Image, Chennai and did the subtitles ourselves. The problem with the DCP projection quality is that it looks different on different screens. That is, every theatre (in Kerala, Chennai & Germany) had a different projection quality. In one theatre, the colour loss was awful. The DCP was only as good as the theatre it was screened in. So you got to be mindful about that.

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  1. ‘A’ FOR AMAZING

The screening for the CBFC panel was the first big screen event. The examining committee consisted of 5 men and 2 women, and they also looked like the examining committee. The thing was, you had to arrange a big projection screening at a nice venue, provide them with entertainment, food of their choice and tea and patiently wait for them to screw you. We sat outside as if waiting for an interview, not nervous but curious.

After the screening, our team was called in and after a bit of ‘we liked your film, it was very different’, the regional director said that they had decided to give us an ‘A’ without any cuts. We protested and asked why. To which they said verbatim ‘the Tamil audience cannot accept a woman smoking on screen’ and even though the board understood the artistic merit of the film, there were ‘some things’ that cannot be shown on screen which ‘society cannot see’. Apparently, even the ‘kissing scene’ was to an extent a wee bit acceptable, but they didn’t say that. They also said that ‘society’ will not understand if we talked about ‘GDP and economy’. And we argued and argued, and after more than an hour, they were pretty emphatic on their stand. And we grudgingly accepted and later decided not to contest it at the tribunal. And we wore the ‘A’ as a badge. This would later cost us a little, at the meetings with the distributors.

  1. OF POLITICAL PARTIES & DISTRIBUTION NIGHTMARES

Ayynoorum Ayynthum (500 & 5)’ was officially selected at 2 Film Festivals. The IFFK (International Film Festival of Kerala) in 2012 and the Stuttgart Indian Film Festival at Germany in 2013. We didn’t send the film to other festivals because we knew it would take time and we wanted to focus on getting it released in our home ground. Then started one of the longest ordeals in this journey. We started meeting people. People in the industry, outside the industry, in between the inside and the outside, and anyone and everyone who we thought was going to get our film distributed or sold. Many distributors and intermediate people told us that to get a release, we needed to have done a few things. You know, the usual suspects. That we should have cast known ‘saleable’ faces, or be more ‘commercial’, or had comedy sequences or had followed a conventional story format, or had a ‘glamour’ quotient, that it should not be rated ‘A’ and stuff like that.

When we made the film we never imagined what kind of a film ours would be. But later, as we started going through the distribution circus, I was forced to wonder. Was it a ‘festival’ film or a so-called ‘mainstream commercial’ film? I had no idea. I figured ours was somewhere in between and kept showing the film.

Almost a 100 people related to the film industry saw it and everyone had an opinion of how the film should be. That for a 1st film, it should be less experimental and more commercial. And that once we were successful and ‘made it’, we could experiment with whatever. Some of them were middlemen to middlemen. Some wanted a piece of the pie if they helped us sell the film. We told them yes, as long as the buyer released our film. But that too went in vain. There were times when we went to some real shady places to show our film.

A few memorable things.

One day, we met a film reporter from a major Tamil news magazine who was really impressed by our film and the concept. He believed in us so much that he took us to a key person from a national production/distribution house who was apparently known as a different thinker in the industry. He was supposedly the decision-maker and had a flair for identifying good films. So, very hopefully, we went to their office with the reporter. We thought this was ‘the’ person/deal that was going to launch our film to the people. This was it, we thought. But half-way through the screening of the film, the person stopped the movie and said that though he liked the ‘scenes’, the anthology format would not ‘work’ with the audience and that it was not ‘commercial’. That the Tamil audience will not understand ‘stuff like this’ and that they are ‘simple’. I was silently fuming and my team was sitting quietly too. But the moment he started advising us as to how the story could have progressed that we should have done ‘this and that’ to be more marketable, I lost it. I told him that if he didn’t like the film and if it wasn’t for their banner, we would silently walk away. But that he had no right to tell us how to make our film. And if he wanted to change the scenes, it would be his movie and not ours. And that no producer/distributor can ever predict the ‘commercial’ success of any movie until it’s been released. He fumed at my response saying I was arrogant and uninformed. So that was the end of that.

Politically Incorrect

There were also people affiliated to a national political party who took us to this ‘influential’ person who was decked in gold and platinum (no exaggeration). We couldn’t see his knuckles because all his fingers had thick, gold rings with big precious stones on them. Here we were, taking our film (which ideologically talks about eliminating the concept of money) to one of the wealthiest persons we had ever met. Of course, no brownie points as to what was the outcome of the meeting. And within a month of us meeting him, his name was on all the news channels for one of the biggest corruption scandals. We went blank.

There was one distributor who was affiliated to another major political party, who liked the film except the ‘climax’. His disconnect was apparently the ideology. He told us that if we changed the climax to something that he suggested, then he would buy our film for 50 lakhs and get it distributed. For us, the climax is the most defining moment in the whole film and he wanted to change that. We knew what we had to do. Walk away politely. So, my point is, we stretched the threshold of our hope to the very extreme. We believed in everyone, anyone, even if we knew they were not related to the film industry. A lot of friends tried to help us connect to people in the industry hoping that someone would buy our film or at least get it released under their banner.

Investment Shanker 

The final hope came in the form of an investor who ‘loved’ the film. And he understood our struggle and said that he would distribute it himself. And that the money he was expecting from a business deal was going to arrive shortly. And made us set up office and get all the marketing and publicity materials ready. We broke down the budget he gave us and literally created a comprehensive release strategy. We planned everything we could to help the investor release the film and waited for the only thing that would set everything in motion. The money. After a highly anticipatory wait for a couple of months or so, the investor said his business deal didn’t go well as expected and that he was sorry he couldn’t muster up the money.

I think that was the last straw. After that, I think we became numb. To everything. The distribution exercise was one of the biggest, most painful and eye-opening reality checks of our lives. But in retrospect, it was a necessary and humbling lesson.

  1. YEAR OF SILENCE

The year 2015 was mostly a year of silence. After making a conscious decision, we abandoned our film altogether and let it gather dust. I travelled, read a lot, wrote more than a couple of scripts, made a short film, travelled for a few months, drowned in coffee, met new friends, had interesting conversations and was generally introspective as to what the next step was. My team was also scattered, doing different things. In between, friends and other acquaintances would occasionally ask us about our film and we would just say ‘we don’t know’ and moved on. Even our most enthusiastic supporters stopped asking us about our film. They probably thought we were depressed and done for, having spent so much money and time and nothing came out of it. We were in hiding and at one point even actually forgot we made a feature film.

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  1. WHEN YOU LET IT GO…YOU LET IT GO!

2016, we felt a renewed vigour. We were out of the ‘slump’. Even got to a bit of a zen state. Kind of like Neo in The Matrix’s last scene, when he would just look at the oncoming bullets and they would stop and drop down. Like nothing mattered anymore. Lakhs of money spent on the film didn’t matter. Time spent didn’t matter. All that blood and sweat didn’t matter. Film not getting released in cinemas didn’t matter. Nothing.

Well, only one thing mattered. To give our film to the people. For whom it was intended.  Free of cost. So we fixed the release date. May 1, Labour Day. No matter what. Free. (It was also then that we realized that there were close to about 300 Tamil films that were in the cans, unreleased, for years)

Some of our well-wishers and supporters panicked. Many asked us if we were doing the ‘right’ thing. That maybe somebody would buy the film and release it. We smiled and did what we said we would. We plastered our film’s posters all over Chennai and some parts of Tamil Nadu, like it was going to be released in theaters. We had little money saved up for that. We had one final big screen event at the Alliance Francaise Madras and the next day, it was OUT. For anyone and everyone to see. Later we also went to the DVD pirate shops and gave our film for free saying that they were free to make money off of this film, if they could.

And the most wonderful thing happened to us. We felt free, unshackled. And that changed a lot of things. In fact, life itself.

  1. EPIPHANIES and NEW BEGINNINGS

It’s been 4 years since we made our 1st feature, and only in 2016 we started picking up the pieces and are creating new stuff. The wariness of not finding distribution for the 1st film has made me rethink a lot of things. I hate to say this but now sometimes, the passion is more deliberate and calculated. For most filmmakers, perhaps their first films are both a curse and a boon. Curse because you go through your most passionate, painful and personal catharsis only to realize that your film doesn’t ‘make it’ the way you wanted it to. And boon because through this most painful and satisfying process you learn to wake up to the reality of the world. You become ‘wiser’, for lack of a less pretentious word.

For many of us, the experience of the 1st film makes us wary and prejudiced about the future of the next film. And with every film, you lose more and more of your innocence making you more prejudiced about the whole process. So I think the challenge is to retain our sense of naivety and wonder about the whole process, despite experiences that tell you the contrary.

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New Landscapes

Needless to say, with the changing landscape we are also now looking at other forms of narratives. We have been making new short films and are trying to develop some long-form web content. My writing is more honest now, I think. And as a team, we also want to make some meaningful work. Break some of our own barriers. Get out of our comfort zone and create more. Still, the challenges of revenue and sustainability persist. Perhaps, we will find newer ways of doing things, I don’t know.

Sometimes, the confusion and chaos in choosing projects now is more but the restlessness of not starting the next film is also overpowering the wariness about what may happen. The ‘need’ to tell the story is slowly taking precedence. In the last 2 years, I have written at least 3 scripts and have several scripts in various stages of development. With each script I am writing now, I am trying to be more mindful and wary about the budget, the logistics, the doability, distribution etc. Questions like ‘Is this a script we can make on our own?’ ‘Does this script have less than 5 characters?’, ‘Can we tell a good story with the barest minimum of resources?’ constantly arise. But I hope we can soon get on to that wild, restless, adrenaline-packed mode of making the film. Because sometimes, ideas flow like the river, no matter the consequences. They refuse to be shackled inside. As they say ‘No army can stop an idea whose time has come’.

There are many filmmakers and visual story-tellers who are really inspiring in the way they break molds and give their ideas life. Many are redefining creation and culture. Making new and consistent work, trying to find the distribution route that is right for them, being open to new possibilities. In all this, one thing that Steven Soderbergh apparently said, stands out – Don’t be afraid to create your own path. I honestly feel there is no other way. Because waiting for someone else to pave the way for us can only set us back. The only thing we can hope for, is to create our own culture, our own system, the way we want it. It may not be conventional but it will be satisfying, as it is for us now. And also, as Mark Duplass epiphanically put it ‘The cavalry isn’t coming’. We have to create our own army, who are passionate about creation, the way it appeals to us.

Finally, making an independent film feels like subverting the status quo. You feel like you’re bending the rules of the game. Making ‘money and resources’ bend to creativity and not the other way round, which is typically the case. Mind over matter, if you will. And if we can stretch the available resources to its limits, we could work a little magic creatively. Combine this with the anger because I’d be lying if I said there was no anger behind this. An anger seething from the insides, from the very depths, directed at a lot of things that’s happening around us. But guess what, gradually even the anger behind the art is becoming passé. Which is why I resist that urge to rant and swear at the ‘system’, at least for now. So ultimately, we had to do this film for us, for those who believed in us and for everyone who ever lost hope in trying to create something that they cared deeply about.

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                                          TEAM: Stanzin Raghu, Maverick Dass, Earthling K, Ramesh Mourthy

FULL MOVIE (in HD):