In 2009, Guneet Monga had attended a gathering at Blue Frog where she was privy to a conversation addressed by the late Yash Chopra. He had said that tomorrow films are going to be made on mobile phones and he is going to be one of the directors doing that. That conversation has stayed with Guneet for more than a decade now. “I always thought main bhi mobile ke liye picture banaungi [I will also make movies for mobile phones],” says Guneet sitting in her unassuming office in Versova that is bustling with energy.
There are more than a dozen actors, seven directors and many entertainment journalists occupying every inch of space in the two-tier old Mumbai building. The occasion is the launch of Zindagi inShort—an omnibus of seven short films, three of which have been shot on iPhones, bringing out the flavours of life from the perspective of people in different age groups. Guneet produced the films for Flipkart Video that would stream on its mobile app.
The home-grown e-commerce platform Flipkart (now being managed by Walmart), last year entered into the content creation space that is largely unknown to it. It decided to create original content and added a video vertical to its app to woo more consumers, mainly in the smaller towns and cities “who are under-served in terms of content” as per Prakash Sikaria, vice president (Growth and Monetisation) at Flipkart. After acquiring content—films and series— from streaming platforms like Voot, TVF among others and creating a non-fiction chat show, Backbenchers, with choreographer-director Farah Khan as the host last year, Zindagi inShort is its first original fiction content.
An aging woman’s plight of being taken for granted by her husband and daughter in Pinni. An old woman, living alone, fights with her fright of dwarf men as she suffers from dementia in Nano Sa Phobia. Chhaju Ke Dahi Bhalle is a bitter-sweet story set in Punjab in the times of digital romance, while Sunny Side Upar is a coming-of-age drama revolving around a young female doctor. Swaaha and Sleeping Partner revolve around middle-aged couples in two different stages, dissect infidelity and its effect. And, Thappad featuring a child protagonist, is a sweet story about childhood angst.
The short film space is cluttered with every kind of story finding its way to the many YouTube channels that’s only been on the rise. “That is why we have brought Guneet on board,” says Sikaria, who wanted the content on Flipkart to have a recall value, apart from “what will the content created just for mobile look like”.
Guneet, on her part, takes pride in the fact that she has “produced more than 70 short films”. Instead of being bothered by the clutter or the “information overload” that is happening because of the digital boom, she is loving how the short film space has been evolving in the last half-a-decade or so. “In 2010, I was nominated for Oscar for a short film, Kavi, which I had produced. And. In 2019, I won an Oscar as a producer for the short documentary Period: End of Sentence. I love this space. Both those films were first-time directors. And all these seven films are from new directors. It is great to be in this space, to have more and more opportunities, to be able to tell stories in short format. I celebrate it,” she says amid sips of coconut milk as part of a diet she has just begun.
She adds that she learned a lot curating this anthology. That they could trust the seven new directors, selected after meeting 300 directors, who came on-board for the omnibus. “Every studio that has come into India has said that we want to create content with Bollywood, the biggest and the best. But here, we are truly celebrating stories. And that I think is a true representation of content.”
She has always believed that it is content that makes a platform and not the other way round. “One show made Hulu,” she says referencing The Handmaid’s Tale. “I feel like I have been a disruptor within the industry. I have been on the periphery of Bollywood,” says Guneet, who has crowdfunded finances for films like The Lunchbox, Masaan, Haraamkhor and Peddlers, that have gone on to become festival favourites and have been appreciated for the content too. “There have been bottlenecks and I have found a way around those.”
In 2010, with That Girl In Yellow Boots, she landed up in Venice for the Venice Film Festival with overprinted stationery. She had thought she will put up the posters everywhere to reach out to more people. “But I was told that every hoarding needs to be bought. I had no idea that you have to buy for this,” she laughs at her silliness recalling her first festival tour. “But I had 100 posters, which I eventually stapled on our back and walked on the streets.” It worked. For every film there on, there was a new way to fund a film. Like scripts of Haraamkhor, Peddlers and others were put on Facebook to create funding. “People didn’t want to tell those stories because they were first-time directors,” she says, adding that a collaboration with Flipkart in hindsight is a result of being in the business of disruptions, “and in the Bengaluru tech term, creating an incubator”. “That is the how the industry will expand. Otherwise, it will always be bottleneck. It will always be five people patting each other’s back.”
The seven films are bound together in some way or the other to stories of women in different age groups. Guneet says all her work has a subtext of empowered women. “That’s a conscious eye. We don’t want to talk about it [much]. I don’t think that as cinema or content-makers, we can make a change,” she adds after a pause, “Change is a huge word. But since our politicians can’t do it, as content creators maybe we can’t bring a change, but we can surely start a conversation. We surely are controllers of soft power. In terms of that, it is very important how we represent our women.”
