‘Slapped’ was shot during the lockdown in Bengaluru

Director Prataya Saha says the four-minute film took nine hours to shoot. ‘Slapped’ is now available to view on shorted.in

Bengaluru-based, multiple award-winning director Prataya Saha remotely shot a short film Slapped. The film is on view at Shorted, an online short film portal, under the Lockdown Film Challenge. The film occurs over a conversation between the oppressor and oppressed across the door. On the face of it, Slapped is about domestic violence, but there is an unexpected conclusion to it. “It is a four-minute film that took me nine hours to shoot,” says Prataya. The cast and crew live in different cities. “The script writer Tanuj Khosla is in Singapore, the actor Moumi Ghosh and the colourist Jai Mangal Sharma are in Bengaluru, and the cinematographer Abhishekh Saravanan is in Trivandrum.”

The camera was sent by Dunzo to Moumi’s house. “It took us nine hours to set up the house, we did online rehearsals, and then we mapped out how we are going to shoot the film. It took another two to three days to edit the film,” says Prataya.

When the script came from Tanuj (who holds both the Singapore Book of Records and India Book of Records for ‘Most Short Plays By A Playwright Performed Consecutively’), Prataya was excited by its scope. “I received the script in April and I talked to Anshulika Kapoor, who produced it.” Tanuj adds: “The idea came to me after reading reports on domestic violence, but I wrote the script without any moral judgements.”

The film has been selected for the Lift off Film festival UK. “This is a monthly festival and we got through the one in June. We are among 125 films selected all over the world,” says Prataya, adding: “It has also been chosen to be screened at the Marbella International Film Festival in Spain in October.”

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