BENGALURU: Sometime in 2015-16, theatre artiste and filmmaker Abhishek Iyengar came across a woman in Peenya who was standing with a large suitcase at a bus stand. “Something about her made me stop my vehicle. I was curious about the image of a mill worker standing at mid-day with a suitcase in hand. That image stayed with me,” says Iyengar. This forms the central theme of his short film, Koru, which was screened at the Bangalore International Short Film Festival. The title is derived from a word in Maori (tribal language in New Zealand) that means circle of life.
The story, which has only two major characters, revolves around a couple involved in domestic abuse, which later prompts the woman to leave home for her long-time lover. “In my mind, I had pictured a worker in a field or mill, which is where many in the Peenya area work. For a woman from a lower-middle class family, walking out of her marriage to go back to a lover is quite a decision, something that I thought was challenging and interesting,” he says about the film set in the late 1990s.
Iyengar had actually written it in the format of a play. But when Karthik Rao (the director of the film) read it, he wanted to convert it into a film. “He worked on the screenplay and we found that in the form of a film there were a lot more nuances that needed to be added. For instance, more day-to-day scenes had to be added which were originally not part of the play. Characters needed to be carved out in detail and a lot of piecing together had to be done,” says Iyengar about the 22-minute film.
The roles are played by actor Sonu Gowda and Suraj Kiran. The movie was shot in the early part of 2019, with the rest of the year spent in completing the post-production. “There was also this constant need in a film to be realistic. We need to closely look into the make-up and costumes. Sometimes you don’t know how much is too much,” he says.