Island City is yet another film that proves India is one of the most exciting places in the world for independent filmmakers.
Director Ruchika Oberoi’s first film, which will have its world premiere tomorrow in the Venice Days section of the 72nd Venice Film Festival, is a black comedy set in Mumbai, with quirky characters and distinct musical choices, reminiscent of the renowned Finnish auteur, Aki Kaurismäki.
The film is divided into three loosely connected short comedies. The first, Fun Committee, stars Vinay Pathak, who is known for his offbeat performances in Bheja Fry and Badlapur. Pathak plays an office worker who is chosen by managers to take part in fun activities that they think will bolster the morale of their employees.
In the second segment, The Ghost in the Machine, a family imagines that the star of a television soap opera has replaced the hospitalised head of the family in their home. The third, Contact, features Brick Lane star Tannishtha Chatterjee as Aarti, a slum dweller who receives mysterious letters.
“I just thought it would be interesting to do a film on three different characters with three different perspectives, without a very strict theme connecting them all, but some loose link,” says Oberoi.
It’s not only a sense of humour that connects the segments – director Oberoi sees Mumbai, the island city, as the thread that binds them together.
“I didn’t start out making a story about Bombay,” she says. “I started out wanting to talk about control and asking how much freedom we really have, even in times when the economy is growing and there is a sense of individual freedom.”
While these ideas are present in each of the stories – where the suppressed come from all walks of life, genders and social class – Oberoi has also captured the changing face of the home of the Indian film industry.
“The city is present, because it creates this isolation – there is a sense of alienation,” she says. “A lot of people are coming from the outside and coming to the city where they are cut off from their families. Bombay is, and can be, a very naked place.”
This is an experience the director can identify with.
“I’m from a middle-class background in Delhi, but when I moved to Mumbai, I got a job that didn’t pay me well – if they paid me at all,” says Oberoi. “Then, when I married my husband, that changed and I began to live a more middle-class life again.”
Her husband has been a great muse, as it turns out. It was he who told the director about a “fun committee” that had been set up in his office, which inspired the first segment. He also suggested the concept of the third film, Contact.
“My husband came up with the basic idea of a story about a girl who received letters and realises that they are sent by a machine,” says Oberoi. ” Then I adapted it and changed the setting and characters around, setting it in a different milieu. These are all stories that interested me from things I saw and experienced.
“So, the Fun Committee I thought of more as a black comedy. But I didn’t really design all the stories to be comedies, or have a similar tone. The films got their qualities from the situations of the story.
“The first one had comedy inherent in the situation. The second one, I actually knew this person who had television banned at home and used to keep a set in the office.”
Oberoi studied literature and wrote poems while living in New Delhi, but when she moved to Mumbai, she caught the film bug and started a short course in filmmaking.
She began watching world cinema and developed an affection for the work of Kaurismäki, the director of The Man Without a Past and Leningrad Cowboys Go America. "I like that kind of humour and, of course, I gravitate to that," she says. "I wanted to expand on it, and I know that it's easy to fail and to get the texture of films such as that." The trouble was that there was no outlet for the type of black comedies that she wanted to make. So initially she worked in commercial cinema. However, with the Indian film scene broadening over the past decade, Oberoi saw an opportunity to make her mark on the Indian film scene.
Films such as last year's festival smash hit Court were an inspiration.
“There are so many great films coming out of India, it’s energising to see that,” she says. “And it influences everyone.”
• Island City will debut tomorrow at the Venice Film Festival, which runs until Saturday
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