Tell us more about your brush with short films.
I’ve acted in a ton of short films as a student and even when I was older, because I think when we were in college I had a lot of students around who were doing Mass Com so I acted in all their short films. We also made short films. I also directed one called Namkaran in 2007 for KGAF. I’ve been acting in short films here and there a little bit. I find this medium very liberating especially now, for two reasons, one is that you don’t have the headache of release on Friday. For that you need the big bucks. You need to be a very big star and you need to have a lot of money. It’s great to have digital content that way, so you can avoid all that. And another huge advantage is that there’s no censorship yet.
With no censorship yet on OTT platforms, can the medium be a tool for social change?
Digital content allows you that freedom, but what to do with that freedom depends entirely on and remains in the hands of the artist, the maker. We do have this freedom right now. If one wants it to be a tool for social change then it could certainly be so but so much depends on the intent of the maker. But I think films inherently don’t have to be a tool for social change — it’s great if they are. However, it is not incumbent upon the film to carry that value, it could be purely for aesthetics instead of being a message.
What is your take on it, personally, now that you are doing this project which can actually open up scope to discuss LGBTQ+ rights?
Personally, I am interested in human beings, interactions between human beings and often the internal changes within a person. I’m interested in characters who go through certain growth or characters who go through a point of transition; how family dynamics or group dynamics work; how people have unequal positions in society; how they interact.
You have played some very complex characters, like in Lipstick Under My Burkha. How do you tap into that, as an actress?
A lot of it is also what the director brings to me, the director and the writer. In projects like Lipstick Under My Burkha, it’s a huge advantage because a lot of it is written into the script and it is also a reason for me to choose the script in the first place, because these are well etched out characters, well thought out characters and thought has gone into whatever it is one wants to show, whatever the theme be. In Lipstick under my Burkha, that’s why I chose the film, because it showed that theme so starkly. There are acceptable ways about how women are depicted on screen and it doesn’t necessarily reflect what the reality of a woman’s life is. But Alankrita (Shrivastava, director) really bridges that gap. Because she writes scenes which you don’t usually see on the screen. The less desirable qualities of a human being or the reality of how people behave when they are in love or when they are angry… Those kinds of things we don’t really see on screen. There are many things which happen behind the screen, the realities of our lives being lived is actually different. I like scripts which depict things authentically and genuinely. And I’m partial to first time filmmakers because I really think they bring something really special to the table.
Playing a transgender in this film, you just mentioned the inner work that goes behind the screen. Did it change you as a person, your perspective?
We live with so much fear especially in terms of when our own feelings are involved. In areas of love, we deal with a lot of fear: of rejection, and being accepted as who we are, and very often we are very scared to make the first move or to acknowledge our feelings or to say “I want this”. And I saw with this character that she actually has been through so much and she is somebody who is so brave. I never noticed that earlier, that we feel so scared. We are born women, we know that we are going to be accepted as women and still we are scared in love. But for somebody who has become a woman, it is so frightening, will she even be accepted as a woman and then even accepted in love? That was a huge thing for me, to say ‘Why am I so scared? Look at her, she’s so brave!’ That was the major thing about the shift of perspective, it made me braver.
