BENGALURU: Most of the time we communicate with words and hardly pause and notice various non-verbal cues during interactions.
Now a collection of six short length movies aims to explore this particular aspect of communication in different settings under ‘The Language Project’. Prataya Saha, one of the two directors of the project, lays out the goal of this project.
It all started when the creative director of the project, Ritotopriya Saha, was in Barcelona while pursuing a masters degree. While at a cafe he noticed an interaction between a local and an African-American tourist. “One of them had asked for a lighter and they went on interacting for around 10 minutes and smoking away. All this without knowing each other’s language and seemed to understand each other perfectly. This was the inspiration for the project,” he says.
There is segregation of people based on language, however, when you go to a different country you actually do not need to learn the language, he adds.
When they started off this, the idea was to make separate short films ranging from 5 to 35 minutes. The first movie was made by Prataya titled ‘Talk Me Not’, a 10-minute movie about a couple who go through altercation, separation and finally reconciliation.
“We got a good response for Talk Me Not and screened it three times. After each screening people would come to us and tell us that they wanted more. So we decided to knit together independent movies with the common thread being non-verbal language,” he says.
The first movie was shot in four months starting last September. The editor of the famous Kannada indie road movie, Rama Rama Re also collaborated for this movie.
Prataya Saha balances his full-time job as a senior business analyst with Accenture with his passion for filmmaking. “I sometimes say I work seven days a week, Five days as a business analyst and two days as a director,” he says jokingly.
The other five movies will have different contexts. For example, one movie that will hit the floors soon is in a war setting and involves communication between two soldiers. Another is about two convicts and a plot revolving differences in culture in food and personalities.
Yet another is based on the interaction between an Indian girl and a man from a western country. “The project also explores the negative side of things too. All themes are varied and the settings are not monotonous” he says.