As his movie was winning the audience at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, Shwetaabh Singh set out to do what he does best—studying the craft and characters. The producer of the hugely acclaimed satirical drama Eeb Allay Ooo!—currently streaming on Netflix—watched the new Johnny Depp film Minamata and heard Helen Mirren speak after the celebrated English actor received an honorary Golden Bear. “There were so many famous actors and directors. And people were talking about you, about Indian cinema,” says Singh about his experience in Berlin where the first film he produced had its European premiere. Eeb Allay Ooo! focuses on the life of a migrant in Delhi who guards government buildings against intruding monkeys.
His second, Aise Hee (Just Like That), which handles motherhood in the story of an elderly woman seeking a liberated life after her husband dies, is ready for OTT release. The film had its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival in 2019.
The Berlin festival happened in February 2020 just as the world was beginning to go into lockdown from the Covid-19 pandemic. “It affected us all. Everything became difficult. But we used this time to develop ideas so that we are ready when work resumes,” says 30-year-old Singh.
Recently, Singh joined actor Abhishek Banerjee to launch their production house, named Freaks, aimed as a collaborative platform for young talent. He says, “We want to work with people who have freaky ideas. We don’t want to work on bankable names. We want to work with new talent, unadulterated and unfiltered people. For me, content is not the king. It is always the treatment. It is important for a filmmaker to have their unique way of telling a story. If you think the content is going to set you apart, that is not true.”
The unassuming alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, is comfortable speaking about himself in “we” rather than “I”. This is something, he says, comes from his college days that launched him into the world of art and where everything was about teamwork. At the Kirori Mal College (KMC) in Delhi University, Singh met like-minded people in “one of the oldest student-run theatre societies in the country”. “KMC and FTII had a strong role in both the films that I have produced,” he says. It wasn’t a coincidence that Pratik Vats, who directed Eeb Allay Ooo!, was Singh’s senior at KMC also at FTII.
Shubham, who wrote the film, is another KMC and FTII alumnus. So was Shardul Bharadwaj, the lead actor. “These films would not have been possible if we didn’t know each other. To make films like these, you need to have immense trust in each other. Everyone working together understands what they are doing, that is, trying something independent and novel,” he says. Banerjee too is a KMC and FTII alumnus, so is Kislay, the director of Aise Hee (Just Like That).
Born in Bihar and raised in Delhi, Singh was on the way to becoming an actor in Bollywood after graduating from FTII in 2017. And he acted in a short film in 2018. “But then I thought this (acting) is not the only thing I want to do. I didn’t see myself only as an actor, I wanted to be a creative artist,” he says. Once he got the backing of financiers, he went to Vats. “I told Vats, ‘Let’s make a film, your story, your voice, your treatment. We can create magic if we do not have shackles’,” he says.
In the next one-and-a-half years, Singh produced his first two films. Eeb Allay Ooo! scooped awards at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in 2019. Last year, it won the Filmfare Award for Best Film (Critics).
“We were not thinking about festivals or streaming platforms. We were thinking only about making a film. That is our job. And we wanted to do our job as well as we can,” he explains. The way his films have been received, it’s a job that has surely been done well.