Aloo Bhujia, directed by Lakshmi R Iyer and produced by actor Gul Panag, is one of the two Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films original shorts this year along with Tigmanshu Dhulia’s The Promise that premiered at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. MAMI and Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films have been partnering at the festival for some years now. In Aloo Bhujia, we see a young man, played by Arnav Maggo, who comes to a pub to chill with his friends and gets irritable when his mother calls to check on him. Another man, older in age and experience, played by Rannvijay Singha, sitting at the bar, watches this exchange. Minutes later, a few words are exchanged about mothers, the care for their children and cute antics like eating eating mixture (aloo bhujia) with their tongue straight off their palm.
Excerpts from interviews:
LAKSHMI R IYER
Is mother-son relation a theme you keep revisiting? Your short film First Second Chance (2022), starring Renuka Shahane, about life at an old age home, also revolved around it.
Not always. My last two shorts may look similar to you but are different in many ways. I’ve made about seven short films till now. Seasoned with Love (2019), which got 100 million views, was about a husband, wife and a girlfriend, a very different subject. First Second Chance was not similar, but had a lot of emotion and it was more about the woman and finding herself at the age of 50 than son. The son is just leaving the mother in an old age home. That’s where it ends. Other movies like Appa (2017) is about a mother, father and daughter. Wrong Mistake (2018) is about husband and wife. Another film I’ve done with Gul Panag now, The Game, is about two couples. Yet another with Rajpal Yadav called What’s Up Buddy is about a dog and house help. These are different films, but about relationships and human emotions.
Tell us about your next short film. Is there a feature film too that you’d like to make?
The next film coming up is again with Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films. It’s called The Game and Gul has acted in the film. There’s Joy Sengupta and Sahu. It’s about two pairs of couples, one in their 30s and the other in their 20s, and how they’re playing this game from one table while looking at the other couple. The game then flips. There’s a lot of mystery and intrigue. There’s a courtroom drama also that I’m writing as well as a love story.
GUL PANAG
You’ve had a long association with Royal Stag LargeShort Films, as an actor and as a producer, how much do you enjoy the short film format, and in what ways does it score over feature films?
My association with Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films has been robust and fruitful for some time now. And the reason is that we agree on two fundamental principles of storytelling, one that people today have very little time. People are short-pressed and in that they are either trying to pack in more stuff, or their attention spans are either way small. This is either because of lack of time or because of too much choice in terms of what to watch, and that is why I think the short film format really scores. And both I productions as well as Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films totally come together with this thought that we need to tell engaging stories which are snack-sized, bite-sized, which give you closure and give you a sense of satisfaction. Why I think this is also different from the OTT and the series format that we all love is that you get started on a nice series and then it’s an 8- or 9- or 10-hour commitment, and a new generation of audiences are now emerging who I feel are commitment phobic. I’ll give my example, a new season of a favourite show of mine is out, I really like it and want to watch it, but I’m commitment phobic because I know it’s not committing 20 or 30 minutes of my time. It’s committing 8-10 hours of it. Until I don’t finish the show and have closure, I will struggle with it being hanging over my head. That is why I feel the short film format scores, because it has closure and it engages people in short attention spans, either on account of too much choice or an account of too little.
Your reasons for producing this film, Aloo Bhujia? What are you producing next?
When we started putting together Aloo Bhujia, my brief from the very talented young writer Utkarsh Vaibhav was that he wants to examine the relationship between children and their parents and how that changes from time to time. If we are aware of how we can look at things from what the future holds, maybe we can make better choices in the present. So, as a parent and as a daughter my perspective on parenting has changed dramatically, and I feel that this is something we don’t talk about often enough, the relationship between children, no matter how old they are, they could be in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, if they’re lucky enough to have parents, even when they’re in their 60s, and what the relationship with their parents is and how it must, at all cost be preserved, is something that I feel very strongly about, and that is what we examine in Aloo Bhujia. So, I’ve produced two films for Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films, one of which is premiering here, Aloo Bhujia. There’s another film we’ve produced which again is very topical. It’s called ‘The Game’ and that is on how quick we are to judge and how quick we are to jump to conclusions, and how little our attention spans are. So, both of these films actually are about what we are seeing around us, how our overall patience which is a function of our attention spans is shrinking day by day, be it in our relationships, be it in the way we see the world, be it with anything.
There are a lot of independent filmmakers out there, especially women filmmakers, who may not have any connections in Bollywood. Would you be open to producing an indie film by a nobody if they approach you? What will make the cut for you?
I would absolutely be open to producing a new film out of nowhere with a new filmmaker or new producer. The only criteria, though, is that I want something which is original, something which hasn’t been told in the way we are telling it. There is only a certain number of finite subjects that films can be made on, but in those subjects how differently I’m telling the story, how engaging the story is and how quickly we can run the whole narrative is what would hold my interest.
How have your experiences been on Family Man Season 3 and Paatal Lok Season 2? When will they be released? And what about your character in these two seasons can you tell us about?
For Paatal Lok, I have just received information that we are gearing up to release now. I’m told, it’s very soon, perhaps, in the next few weeks. Again, Paatal Lok as a concept is unique. But it’s the style of storytelling that has made Pataal Lok such a loved show that disturbs people at so many levels because it talks about things that we prefer to not look at. The story of a cop going and investigating something is not new, but the manner in which Jaydeep [Ahlawat] has portrayed the character, the manner in which Sudip [Sharma] and his team have written it, I think that is what’s unique. Its storytelling is refreshing. The take is refreshing, and the fact that when they look at telling a story, it’s a story we all know, but prefer to overlook the inconvenient parts of, so they tell the full story, a story. I think that’s the beauty of Pataal Lok. And we are in production right now on Family Man Season 3. It’s very exciting and I’m glad to be back as Saloni. I’m firstly grateful that my character has received so much love in Season One. Season Two was already written by the time Season One was out. So, thanks to the love of the audiences and everybody who supported the show, I am back in Season 3. It’s very different from the first two seasons.
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