Siddharth Chauhan on Amar Colony: Each character has a void inside them and seek things they cannot easily find

Siddharth Chauhan has a lot to celebrate this year. The filmmaker is gearing up for the world premiere of his debut feature film, Amar Colony, at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. The film has also been selected to be showcased at this year’s International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), which will take place from 9-16 December. Siddharth has helmed a number of popular short films such as Boys Don't Wear Nailpolish!, The Infinite Space, Papa, Pashi and The Flying Trunk, which have earned the filmmaker a number of accolades.

In a candid chat with OTTplay, the filmmaker opened up about the film, set in his hometown of Shimla, what inspired its story and how it connects to his own.

Excerpts from the interview…

Your debut feature film Amar Colony is all set to premiere at the d 27th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) . How are you feeling at the moment?

Oh, I'm feeling super happy. Because I'm aware that only seven films have made it in this section. So I'm just feeling very, very honored that the festival has chosen our film.

Regarding the inspiration for Amar Colony, you said that it was inspired by a wooden structure built during the British era called Titla Hotel, in Jakhu.

I live in Jakhu, Shimla, and just a few meters away, there is this huge wooden dilapidated building. And one would almost mistake it for an abandoned building. but there are so many people who live inside it, it's like a chawl. You will find many chawls in cities, but there are almost none in the hills. And there are a couple of such buildings in Shimla, which have been here since the Britishers time. And people are living there, and they are rented out to students, and other people.

So I was just very fascinated to see that building and I would often imagine how many families are living there and what must be going on in their lives. And that's how this idea came up to make this film, where the title would be the building, which is Amar Colony, and in which I would take my audience on a tour inside this building, and show them what's going on inside.

So was the story inspired by the real life accounts of the families living there?

No, not really. It's totally fictitious. The thing is I wanted to draw inspiration from a real life issue, but in very minor ways. For example the character of Durga, is a woman who's a Hanuman devotee. I used to have a neighbor in my own building, who used to live right below our apartment and she was a religious devotee. So a lot of things about her character have been taken from that real life person. But the overall story and the rest of it is totally fictitious. So my challenge was that I could not just show usual stories, so I thought to myself, that there has to be something unusual, uncanny, or very, very interesting about all these stories, otherwise the audience would get bored.

You’ve referred to the film as a satire on mankind. And it seems like you have explored a lot of hard hitting themes through the film. The film’s producer has also called it a surrealistic and feminist take on existential anxiety, and agency. Could you talk about the whole process of how you were able to marry such significant themes into a story that the audience can grasp easily?

I basically wanted to break away from everything that has been done. So when I asked myself what was happening in these families and in the lives of my characters, I wanted it to be very original and I wanted people to witness and experience something which they have never seen before. That was my thought process. And at the same time, I wanted my characters to be very realistic and relatable.

I don't know how the satire bit came in. I think my gaze as a filmmaker is that of satire. I find humor in very serious circumstances and I am often able to see the Irony in situations, and sometimes I find stupidity that is very interesting, and very fun. So I just tried my best to get out all these things in the character.

How long did it take for you to conceptualize and write the whole story?

This is a very interesting question. I used to work in a production house in Mumbai and we had this small in-house competition, where the judge gave us four words. I don't remember what those four words were. But he asked us to make a story on those four words, like a short film script. So at that time, I had written a short film script. And in 2016, I also made that short film, which was called Papa. Coincidentally even Papa premiered at the International Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) in Kerala, which is the short film wing of the same festival. And it won the Best Short Film Award there. I basically expanded on the story of Papa. So papa was a short film, which was about this wheelchair bound lady and her son and a neighbor.

After making this film I just felt that there was so much more to tell and there was so much more that I wanted to tell, but I could not do it in my short film, because my short film was just 20 minutes long. So I thought why not write a feature film where I get all the freedom to explore these stories and these characters more. So that's what I did. I expanded the story, which was already there in the short film, and made it a totally new story of the neighbor, who is Mira in this film, the pregnant woman. Then I thought, how about having one more neighbor? I wanted to make it a story of three neighbors, because I thought two would be quite boring and three, it would be quite interesting for me as well as a storyteller.

So Amar Colony also features the same characters as your short film Papa did?

Yes. One story is very similar, I will not say it's the same, but it is quite similar. I changed the way their house looks and the way the characters look, and added a couple of new things, but overall, it is very similar to the shots.

The film is set in Shimla and it feels like you've tried to incorporate as much as the, like, local flavor of your hometown as possible in the film. Most of the crew members are from Shimla, the story set in Shimla. But going through the protagonists Plus, you've selected like most of the central protagonists seem to be coming from different parts of the country. So like, was that a conscious decision on your part?

Yes. It's not necessary that your neighbors will also be localites. For example, I had a neighbor from Bihar when I used to spend most of my time in Shimla and I also had a neighbor from Bengal. I thought about making the characters very interesting by giving a different background to them. So, when we were casting for this film, we opened this process and we made it pan India.

We started looking for actors in Delhi, Bombay and Kerala, and that's how we found Sreejith Vijay who was playing Mira's husband in the film. Then we found Nimisha Nair from Delhi and Sangeeta Ji, who lives in the US, who somehow came across my casting call, and she applied and then we happened to go through the process and see whether she would fit the role or not. I was very clear about the characters I wanted, but I was not stuck on this bit that I want to cast only local actors. I was willing to cast anybody. The only thing I needed for this film was fresh faces. I specifically made sure that I don't want anybody who's known in the film. Because they will just take away all the attention and then that rawness of the film will be lost.

You were born and raised in Shimla, so have you also borrowed from your experiences growing up there and incorporated them into the film as well?

It's a very difficult question. I cannot say that the experiences do not come out in the film, they do. But I think it is in ways which are difficult to describe. At a very tangible and surface level, no, there is nothing similar between my life, and the life of the characters which I'm showing. But I think, fundamentally, the pain of these characters is where I maybe related to each one of them. Each character in this film has a void inside them and they are seeking something in their life, which they are not easily getting. I think that is something that I connected with at a very fundamental level and I wanted to give a form to this feeling, this feeling of void. So, it's not only in the characters but within the film, even when you will see the corridors inside the building, you will see that void everywhere in the film.

You are also working on another feature film as well, at the moment?

I'm developing two, three scripts right now.

My next script is a murder mystery. You know the story of the shepherd who cried wolf? There was this tiny shepherd boy with a shepherd who would fool people every day by saying that a wolf has eaten up my sheep and when people would gather, everyone discovers that he's lying.

My grandmother told me this story when I was a child. It was such a dramatic and interesting story. And because I was born and brought up in the hills it was very common for me to come across a Shepherd with a flock of sheep. So I always wanted to tell a story, which is set in such a setting where there are mountains, greenery, lots of sheep. So I'm finally developing a story which is a murder mystery.

Other than this story, I'm also developing a new feature film called The Passport. It is a story of an NRI who loses his passport in Shimla and in the process of looking for his passport, we dive deeper into the family dynamic and we get to understand about his dysfunctional family. So, it's a family drama.