BANGALORE: Taking up the cause of a social issue as grave as water conservation, city-based techie Venkat Bharadwaj has made a Kannada feature film titled A Day in the City. He is the son of producer-director and Puttanakanagal awardee C V Shivashankar.
Bharadwaj has fulfilled his dream of becoming a director after a 20-year wait. “Soon after college, I did not follow my father’s footsteps, as I wanted to travel the world. I worked with HAL for three years and then joined an IT company that required me to travel often. I am now the regional head of the company. I have travelled to 22 countries so far and have spent most of my days outside India. It is only in the past four years that I have started working on some social activities. I have always dreamt of making a film, but I took my own time with it, and A Day in the City only came about last October,” he says.
The film narrates an incident that happens in the city between 6 am and midnight. “The ultimate motive behind doing this film was to show how common people can join hands with public representatives and bureaucrats to address a social problem. At this point, I would not like to reveal much about the story, but I can say that it is about a day-to-day issue that we all face,” explains the director.
“Though the film is captured in the city, this can be considered as a universal subject because such an issue can happen anywhere,” he adds. The film includes 44 characters, of which 36 are techies chosen from major IT companies in the city. All these people are stage artistes who have never had the experience of working on small screen or cinema. Most of them are from his circle of friends.
“I mapped the characters according to their personalities and based on the expressions. Nobody went through any screen test because I knew most of them and what they were capable of doing on screen,” he says.
Speaking more about the film, Bharadwaj says, “We started shooting from January and completed the film by May 31. We only shot on Saturdays and Sundays.”
He goes on to explain how he went about working with 44 actors. “I planned the project beforehand and made a chart of which actors needed to shoot on which day. With such a clear blueprint in hand, I didn’t have any problem.”
Bharadwaj takes credit for writing the story, screenplay and dialogues, but says a few well-known faces have also contributed to the film. “Darshan, accompanied by his brother, released the audio of the film because he liked our initiative. Also, my father was the producer of Darshan’s father Toogudeepa Srinivas’s first film. The music is scored by Shiva Sathya, a disciple of L Vaidyanathan, who scored music for approximately 3,000 episodes of various TV serials. Srinivas Kappanna has played an important role in the film. Viswas Avathi was the director of photography,” he says.
It is a film made on a shoestring budget. “My friend Shankara who resides in the US has invested in the film. It worked out well for me that all the artistes worked for passion and not money. We needed money only for shooting and payment of bills. Our film was mostly shot in and around Bangalore. The songs were shot in Mysore, Mandya and Srirangapatna,” he explains.
Bharadwaj says he is not nervous about his debut, thanks to the confidence gained by interacting with many people from the industry. “I did a lot of homework and I believe in the content of the film. We may be techies, but we have not compromised on quality filmmaking,” he says.
The film is now in its final stages, while Bharadwaj and team are going all out promoting it on the social media. They plan to take the film, which will release in a month’s time, across the world. Bharadwaj says, “Some of my friends living in the US have arranged eight shows in various cities. Another friend of mine will arrange four shows in Africa and we have plans to release it in other countries too.”
