Nukkad Natak team on OTT struggle, limited budget and meaningful cinema
Facing limited options for digital release, Nukkad Natak released in theaters on 27 February. In an exclusive interview, director Tanmay Shekhar and actor Molashree share the challenges of small-scale filmmaking and the importance of telling nuanced social stories.
At a time when many filmmakers want digital releases, street theater Was released in theatres. In an exclusive interview, director Tanmay Shekhar and debutant Moulshree said that over-the-top (OTT) platforms have become increasingly selective and revealed their initial preference for OTT releases. Now he hopes the offline discussion will eventually bring the film to a wider online audience.
The two also reflected on the importance of making films on modest budgets and making meaningful films amidst ultra-violent big-budget films.
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Challenges with OTT platforms
in an interview with India TodayTanmay told, “Even for us it was a long-winded road. When we made the film, we wanted an OTT release because of the subject matter. But in the last 2 years, even OTT has become very selective. Even during this Asi During the promotion, actress Taapsee Pannu said that even a film starring her is no guarantee that an OTT will pick it up.
Tanmaya shared that she took the big screen route in the hope of generating good buzz so that more people can watch the film on OTT, and said, “Even a film like this missing ladies Not much work was done in theatres. It got viewers on OTT.”
Journey of Maulshree and Tanmay
Molashree, who also produced the film, said that his main goal was always acting. She did theater in college and then moved to Mumbai to work in films. “I didn’t know it took so much struggle. I went through like 500 auditions and then got a second role in an ad. Even the auditions I give are for small roles. As an actor, I was just waiting. In a year, I get a chance to be on the set for three days.”
On joining the project, Molashree said that she and Tanmaya had done a short film together scenes of an epidemic. After that, they collaborated street theaterWhich he described as a very liberating and satisfying experience. She recalled working on the project for a month and said that she could connect with her character. “We first found our voice in college and it was captured very well in the script,” the actor insists.
Tanmay told that he graduated from IIT and then went to America to work as a data scientist. He found that job very boring, so he left the job. In America he felt that he too could make films. He said, “I made 2 short films and started working on film sets. I also worked on 2 HBO shows in 2019. After Covid, I came back to India. Since I knew how film sets work, I was determined to create my own content as a writer-director.”
story of street theater Taken from Tanmay’s personal experiences. “I grew up on an IIT campus because my father was a professor. I went home for Diwali and my mother started teaching in Basti. This is the same Basti that appears in the film. I was quite shocked when I went there for the first time. It felt like there were two Indias within one India.”
He said that on one side there is an elite college like IIT and after one kilometer there is this slum, where there is neither electricity nor water. “Geographically, they are very close but People from here don’t go there and people from there don’t go to IIT campus (People from here don’t go there and people from there don’t go to the campus),” said the filmmaker.
Tanmay said that he wanted to write a story about two students in a college with their own world view.
Production Process and Road Casting
Independent films often operate with limited resources. When asked what the biggest challenges were during production, Tanmay said that he wrote the story out of “controlled ambition”. He said, “It wasn’t anything crazy ambitious. I wrote the film based on the resources we had.” The film was shot in the college campus and the colony where his father works.”
Maulshree was also the casting director of the film. Tanmay further added, “Most of it was street casting in Dhanbad. We practiced acting in Basti. Real people were cast and made to act.”
The filmmaker recalled managing crowd scenes with minimal extras, saying, “We had to show a crowd in a scene. I told my producer that I know we have a limited scale, but I wanted 100-200 people for 3 days to appear as extras. Despite all the planning, when we reached the set early in the morning, there were just 30 – 40 people there. So we shot in such a way that it looked like it was a crowd. “Shot with.”
He also admitted that most of the cast and crew were staying at his parents’ house. “My mother and my grandmother were cooking food for everyone,” Tanmaya said.
future of meaningful cinema
The team then considered the importance of stories like street theater. “Currently, the whole scenario is about a male hero, there is a lot of violence. There is a special kind of films that are being released in films,” Maulshree said.
Making a comparison, he said that his film has a female protagonist and a man, named Shivang, is playing a gay character. He said, “These nuances, real social issues, are being lost. We think there is a meaningful cinema that our peers – independent filmmakers – are making, but they are not finding a place.”
The filmmaker said, “Life imitates art, art imitates life. The amount of violence shown in movies is not normal. It’s crazy. Graphically, we’re seeing murders and deaths. I find it very scary that we’re normalizing it. I think the world is going in the wrong direction. Ideally, we want movies like ours to be made. Children who are growing up, or teenagers should see what the world looks like in the world they live in and The world they should aspire to. Not the kind of big films that are being made now.”
Plot and release date
street theater It follows two best friends, Molashree and Shivang, who have to enroll five slum children in a local school after they are expelled for robbing the college canteen. The film was released in theaters on 27 February.