Breathtaking views of rolling hills, beautiful seaside beaches, and crashing waves on the shore. That is what one sees from behind the romantic rose-coloured glasses of a tourist. But what about the guides who chime in with interesting anecdotes or salespersons who give you a memento to carry through your travels? What about their aspirations? That is the question the acclaimed danseuse Savitha Sastry and filmmaker husband
AK Srikanth explore in their new dance film, The Ghost of the Lighthouse, the story of a tourist guide, Anila, in a small coastal town. “This is a story of everyday people and goes into their dreams and ambitions. In this particular case, she [Anila] dreams of leaving that place and going to big cities and having a big life. But she also has responsibilities,” says Srikanth, the writer and director of the film.
The film is a vignette from Anila’s life as she meets a foreigner played by Jamie Alter. While talking about the name of the film, Srikanth says it is not meant to depict a horror story but rather the ghosts of memories and wistful longing that we carry with us. “It starts as a joke because she [Anila] has made up the story about a haunted lighthouse in her town that she tells people. But in the end, she is the one looking at the foreigner sailing away from the lighthouse,” he says.
Sastry is renowned for using Bharatanatyam to break conventional barriers of classical dance. However, this time she speaks of shifting away from making dance as the main element of the story,
“This is the first film that has stepped away from that. We have a dance but it is part of the credits and not the film because Anila is not a dancer. Sri has always been forced to create something for me where the central character is a dancer. I wanted to have him not be boxed in and so this film is a sort of my undertaking where I took on the responsibility of becoming a pure actor for the first time.” Talking about writing a story without dance as a central element, Srikanth says, “While I would be tempted to say it was liberating, the challenge was to write a character that was believable to the story we were trying to portray.”
Srikanth shares that the one thing he will carry from this film is that love is universal, “The film has two looks: one is in her house and those areas are not very pretty looking.” He adds that the cinematographer was worried about how we would show a love story in such a setting. “It struck me that we are conditioned to show things a certain way. You want to show love, so it has to be in the backdrop of rolling green hills, but love and emotions do not depend on any place.”
Composer Abhay Nayampally scores for this short, his seventh collaboration with the duo, who is planning their next production Soul Cages, which will be based on the first stage show they showcased 12 years ago at Kamani Auditorium in Delhi. “That was the first time someone stepped outside of mythology and presented a completely different story. So, we will now be making it into a film with a completely rewritten story,” says Srikanth.