Shridhar Dev Sharma
Paras Gurung

The company, 2^(n) Films, is managed by Paras Gurung and I, Shridhar Dev Sharma. We write, direct and edit our own movies. We also compose our own original soundtracks.

The company was started by both of us back in January 2018. We had worked together at a small production house here in Delhi for about 10 months. Paras Gurung was an editor and I was a production assistant. Through time, we realised the love that we share for movies and how passionate we really are about making films. We soon realised that we had an understanding of the language of cinema and we really wanted to use that in order to express ourselves.

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In our many conversations, we realised that going to Bombay for filmmaking is not an option for us for the following reasons:

1. Money. Going to Bombay isn’t cheap. And especially for people like us who barely earn enough money in Delhi, our home town.

2. The false hope. By studying the career paths of those directors who inspire us, we realised that making movies is not a job. It is not like producers would come to us in Bombay to finance our project just on the basis that we have worked in such-and-such production houses as 1st ads (assistant directors). The only thing that can actually convince anybody will be our body of work. How many projects are under our belt? How many times were we the ones telling people what they are supposed to do? How many times have we written, directed and edited our own movies? Once we realised this, we knew that going to Bombay would be a waste of our time and our money, when one can easily make movies here in Delhi, thanks to the freedom of the digital era.

3. Creativity. Again, by studying the paths of other filmmakers, we identified the place where we actually belong to: independent cinema. We are the type of filmmakers who truly believe that the essence of a movie does not depend on the money that gets spent on making the movie. One can create an extremely low budget movie and that movie can still be more effective than most of the high budget movies that come out every year, if the filmmaker is effective with his or her tools. One can be creative with scriptwriting in order to get the cost down, for example.

4. The best film school. Both of us, separately, in our early days had tried making films with our friends. Years after, it dawned upon us that that was the best way to learn about filmmaking. One can spend years learning all the theories behind all the tools involved in filmmaking and the history of world cinema. But that won’t make him or her a filmmaker. In order to call yourself a filmmaker, you have to make films! You have to feel the pressure of everyone working on your project looking at you and expecting you to tell them what needs to be done. You have to have the authority to be the ultimate decision making machine on the set. That is something the 1st ad won’t learn while he or she is working as an ad, because even he or she is going to look at the director for guidance. Because of this, we have decided to sharpen our tools by making as many short movies as possible with the minimum budget. We have realised that our creativity grows under these restrictions.

5. Content ultimately is the king. For us, it doesn’t really matter which movie was the highest grossing movie in India back in 2004. Now when we think about that year, we can only remember movies such as Swades. Movies that moved us. Movies that inspire us to make our own movies and convey our emotions through the moving images. And that can be done in Delhi as well. We know that over a period of time, people will start connecting with our movies.

6. To start a sort of an independent movement. By making short and feature films in Delhi only, we can provide a new, much smaller, but relatively free platform to those actors who are from Delhi only. We have lost count of how many actors we have met who are originally from Delhi but end up in Bombay because that is the way to go. We intend to change that thinking.

So far, we have made two short films. Hunter Hunted, a short horror, and Falling Apart In Love, a short drama film. Through our body of work, we aim to achieve the following goals:

1. Get connected to the viewers. We want to show that making movies is possible in Delhi. We want to show how passionate we are about this medium of communicating. We want to show that a different type of cinema is possible. We want to show that there are new ways to exhibit the complex nature of our feelings.

2. We have to prove ourselves. To get to the level of making feature films, first we have to prove ourselves. Prove that we know what we are talking about. Prove that we can handle our projects.