God Must Be Waiting: Struggling with writer's block, a script writer has conversations with the protagonists of her tale

When the pandemic upsets your plans of having the world see your cinematic expressions, but still want an outlet to channel your creativity, the best thing to do is to continue working, however small scale it is. That’s just what Kiran Kumar, an associate of filmmaker Guru Deshpande did. Kiran, who had worked on Guru’s Gentleman earlier, was given an opportunity to be a part of the latter’s next, an anthology called Pentagon. But with the pandemic delaying its release, Kiran decided to utilize the time he had and make a short film.

“Writer’s block is something that pretty much every writer worth his/her salt has experienced at some point in their lives. I wanted to use this concept, of a writer struggling with writer’s block, to bring a thriller story to its logical end. The climax has been set up and the writer knows that it will end with the death of one of her protagonists, but how they get to that point alludes her over days, and I thought it would be fun to have her have conversations with her characters to figure out how to present their tale effectively,” explains Kiran about his short film, God Must Be Waiting, which was shot when lockdown relaxations came in, and is currently available to stream on Zee5 as part of its Global Content Fest bucket.

“The second edition of the Zee5 Global Content Festival was announced in January this year. This is a festival for independent moviemakers to showcase their projects of 30 minutes and above run time. The top 50 films were announced recently and have been put on the platform to be streamed. Although my film does not meet this minimum 30-minute criterion, I submitted it and received a note from the platform that they would be interested to stream it. This was immensely encouraging, as they found some merit in my content. God Must Be Waiting is a simple story that we shot in a day, featuring Vamshi Krishna, Nandha Kishore and Mayuri Nataraj,” explains Kiran.

But why did he make the short in English and not Kannada? “I did not want to restrict my subject to a certain set of audience. This was made for YouTube, a platform that has a global audience. The content, about script writing, is universal and I thought it made sense tot present it in English.