BENGALURU : As an independent filmmaker, Prataya Saha has a firm belief in the movies he makes. It’s probably this and a lot of hard work that has landed Saha’s film, The Good Wife, a spot on Disney+Hotstar. The film which started screening earlier this week has done the rounds at several festivals and has won awards in Chicago and Toronto. Set in Dec. ’92 in Kolkata, the stories have been inspired from Saha’s childhood. The movie revolves around the highs, lows, joys, defeat and triumphs of a simple ‘housewife’ in the course of a single day.
For instance, the story meanders in the day of one such woman walking through the streets of a curfew-hit city to get her husband’s favourite food on the occasion of her wedding anniversary, which he may or may not even remember. As the plot continues, she eventually understands that her love for him is as real as her years of social conditioning. “We have tried to explore the strength inside a woman. It is not the strength associated with chest thumping toxic masculinity but a subtler inner feminine strength,” Saha, who adds, “We not only transported the audience visually takes place over the course of one day, the entire process of planning and shooting took 11 months, and began in May 2018.
“The journey with this film has been nothing short of a terrific experience, especially in the international circuit,” he says about the film which has been produced by Red Polka Productions, a city-based theatre and film production house founded by Anshulika Kapoor. He faced some budget constraints too. “For example, we didn’t have the budget for a sound technician.
So we had to create the foley sounds by breaking down the 17-minute film into 30-second segments and then recreating the sounds for the scenes,” he says, adding tha t the p r o c e s s t o o k six months, for which we had to shel l out Rs 35,000. “The total amount spent on the film was Rs 2.5 lakh which was a big deal for us. But we didn’t want the quality of the film to suffer and had to manage this with a minimum budget, which required a lot of planning,” says Saha.