Filmmakers Raj and DK, Nikkhil Advani, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Avinash Arun and Nitya Mehra will explore the themes of new beginnings and moving on through five different short films, which have been shot during the ongoing Covid pandemic. The five short films comprise the anthology ‘Unpaused’, the trailer of which was released recently.
Raj and DK have made ‘Glitch’, starring Gulshan Devaiah and Saiyami Kher. It is about a hypochondriac man who meets a strange girl on a blind date. “Creating ‘The Family Man’ was a liberating experience for us, and the assurance of thinking unconstrained encouraged us to extend our collaboration with ‘Glitch’. We loved making the short, as we tried a new style and genre! It was a bizarrely unique experience,” said Raj and DK. Then there is ‘Apartment’ directed by Nikkhil Advani, starring Richa Chadha, Sumeet Vyas and Ishwak Singh. It will throw light on how a woman spirals into a maze of self-blame and attempts to end her life when she finds out about her husband’s sexual indiscretions. For Advani, it allowed him to “explore complex emotions in a simple way, one that the traditional format would never have permitted.”
Tannishtha has directed ‘Rat-A-Tat’, featuring Rinku Rajguru and Lillete Dubey wherein they will be seen confronting loneliness and forming an unlikely friendship during lockdown. Tannishtha said: “In such unprecedented times, new beginnings are the only hope for many across the world… Shot under lockdown rules it was both exciting and challenging to bring alive the story. I hope the viewers relate and connect with it the way we connected and felt while making it.”
Avinash Arun has helmed ‘Vishaanu’ with Abhishek Banerjee and Geetika Vidya Ohlyan. IT is about a young migrant family who after being thrown out of their rented house during lockdown, decides to illegally sneak into a lavish flat. There is also Nitya Mehra’s ‘Chaand Mubarak’, featuring Ratna Pathak Shah and Shardul Bharadwaj. It is about an affluent middle-aged single woman who is forced to seek help from a young rickshaw driver to run errands during the lockdown in Mumbai.