PremiumA ‘Mirage’ of our captivation to the cloud that holds our memory - Vishal Bhardwaj, Vikramaditya Motwane and Rohan Sippy mentor 5 potent short films
MAMI released five short films on their YouTube channel all shot on iPhone and here's a review of them all.
Last Updated: 11.48 AM, Apr 22, 2024
Last year, filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj took the world by storm when he shot a 30-minute-long short movie with Ishaan Khattar and Wamiqa Gabbi in the lead on an iPhone with proper setup, song, and dance, as Gulzar Sahab joined him to add poetry to the mix. Yes, we are talking about Fursat. This season, the filmmaker sits on the mentoring chair at MAMI Select as five filmmakers set out to tell stories ranging from cross-border dynamics to self-assessing therapy to a man touching death to realize the taste of life. There is a whole lot of creativity involved here, considering these five short films are shot on phones, but the quality never lacks a single note.
Let's take a deep dive into these five short films that are made by 5 incredibly talented budding filmmakers who walk in with resumes that are not just impressive but ones to watch out for. Read on to know everything about this very interesting set of movies.
MIRAGE
Director: Archana Atul Phadke.
All of us have built our parallel world on our phones. We wander through its corners for a better part of every day, and there is no way we are bartering it for anything, at least not very easily. Archana Phadke, the filmmaker who gave us one of the best documentaries of our times with About Love, takes on the challenge of presenting a mirage in a place where you would least expect something like it. The visual language of Phadke is strong enough to place a story called ‘Mirage’ in a desert and wander there with an iPhone shooting the most scenic sand dunes. The power of this short is in the fact that it chooses a landscape where there is just a phone in the name of technology, and it very much rules the people around it. For a young boy, it is the games on the phone that are his real world, and when you take it away, the real world feels like an alien land to him. He is fascinated to see a beetle while many of those crawl around him daily, but the phone never lets him see beyond.
Phadke is magnificently supported by her editor who ensures the blurring line is conveyed not just with the idea but also visually. The worlds collide in the most organic way where the jump cuts don't feel like jerks. A short film that will be interpreted in so many ways.
ÓBUR
Director: Faraz Ali
The most hard-hitting, magnificent, and visually stunning of them all. Óbur, meaning cloud, takes you to a land far away from the modern world where cloud storage is still a subject of fascination. “Won't the data fall on us if an airplane hits the cloud it's stored in?” says a person clueless about how it works. But at the center of it is a boy who has been struggling to make ends meet with a bedridden mother to take care of. In a tragic moment, he loses his mother, and all he is left with of her is the photos that he has stored in the cloud memory of a local cyber shop. But with no internet around, he has to now make sure he gets back his memories. Faraz Ali very cleverly asks a simple question, what are we without our stored data? Our footprints, in a way, are our pictures, and what if we suddenly disappear and even the footprint is wiped off?
The cunning plot device to not show the mother’s face until the boy has found a way to access the cloud storage does wonders here. And right when we get a glimpse of her in his eyes (a shot that stands out in this entire anthology, and maybe amongst all the releases in recent times), the power is cut and the access is lost…again! Óbur is a slow-burning reminder of how much technology has taken over our consciousness and what it looks like in the third person.
JAL TU JALAAL TU
Director: Prateek Vats.
What if your employer isn't even bothered about remembering your face, forget your name, after you have worked for them for over two decades? What if you just choose to laugh at a hectic day at work, and that wipes out all the dedication you showed in those twenty-odd years? Prateek Vats, who has the power of replicating the working class on the screen with the most finesse, tells a story of a man who can be defined as a ‘Good Human’, and you would forget him in a day or two. But has he forgotten himself, accepting the oblivion? What happens when he decides to take charge again? Jal Tu Jalaal Tu has a very evident Vishal Bhardwaj touch, but there is Vats written all over it too. The only film with a different screen ratio, Prateek’s visual idea of the short can be defined as ‘Wes Anderson if he ever chooses to make a film with only muted colors’. There is a certain synchronization in every frame; each part of it is in the control of the director, and not many filmmakers can convey their control so organically.
At the center of it is a performance that stands out amongst the five shorts. Harish Khanna brings the correct balance as he knows where he needs to be subtle and where the drama is needed. There is an underlined playfulness in Jal Tu Jalaal Tu, and Harish deserves credit for it too.
A NEW LIFE
Director: Saumyananda Sahi.
Probably the weakest short if you compare it with the rest. A New Life does have a story that holds a lot of merit. In a fast-paced life where our jobs have taken the primary chair in our lives and personal life has taken a back seat, Saumyananda wants to ask us whether it's worth it or not. When a man comes to a different city to find a job leaving his pregnant wife behind and agrees to stay another day in that city because the rude employers feel better if they make people suffer, he learns a lesson. When he loses his eyesight for a while and gets to know it was a life-threatening stroke of sorts, he gets the taste of life as he stands close to death. He realizes the importance of putting family before everything else, and a lesson is learned.
The problem with A New Life is that it's a story that deserves a longer runtime. The bracket of odd 30 minutes is too little to tell a story so complex. So the jumps from one realization to another seem abrupt because there is a lot left for the audience to decode.
CROSSING BORDERS
Director: Saurav Rai
There is always tension when you read the word border. Either it is already present, or you know the next few lines will have it. Crossing Borders for the most part of it walks on that line where you think a tragedy is about to hit the lives of these three people who have crossed paths only to get entangled with each other. In a way, all three of them are thieves, and smuggling goods across borders is their thing. I will probably need another viewing to decode this one, but the way it shows the playfulness of a very dangerous thing happening at the border is quite an interesting approach. However, their motives are never explored well enough for us to be on their side. What is emphasized is the accuracy of the language, and that adds a very potent layer to the short.
All five short films are now streaming on YouTube. Stay tuned to OTTplay for more such content and everything else from the world of streaming and films.