Gitanjali Rao says with "Bombay Rose", her colourful animation feature that has been winning hearts in international film festival circuits, she wanted to explore the story of regular people whose dreams are swept away in a corner.
Rao believes Mumbai is made of immigrants who are building, cleaning and running the city but never feel at home.
"Everybody in Bombay has left some place, come here and are trying to survive. A lot of stories have been told about people who make it big. But there are thousands who are not able to achieve that and they're essentially the ones who are running the city, building it, cleaning it and yet they're the ones who are marginalised or swept away in a corner.
"This is unfair, but this is how the city is. I felt that the beauty was not in the people who are successful, but in those who are trying to survive huge difficulties with small successes every day," Rao told PTI in an interview.
The film, which has toured festivals like Venice, Toronto, London and Busan before its India premiere at the Mumbai Film Festival, features beautiful hand-painted frames that have been turned into animation.
The core story of "Bombay Rose", which Rao has directed, written, edited and designed, is about Kamala, a flower-seller who moonlights as a bar dancer and Salim, a cinema-loving Kashmiri immigrant with dreams to make it big in the city. They both are struggling to make ends meet but are drawn to each other.
Rao said she made the deliberate choice to not just only focus on characters' struggles but also on the "special" moments that they encounter in their lives.
"Nothing grand ever happens to any of my characters but whatever is happening is very special and it still keeps people engaged. At the same time, I also want people to not turn their faces away from the realities that these people live with every day and that does happen to people in Bombay."
"When you're in your 60s and 70s and have lived a full life, you can have nostalgia. Every old person I encounter are living in that world. I have travelled with my mother a lot. She's always reliving the beautiful times of her life. So after a certain age, you're reliving your life."
"What happened after 90 days, suddenly there was a breach in a place like Bombay. Suddenly the other community became very, very bad. And these were tremors were felt almost daily. So to me, it was, in a sense, the death of a beautiful part of Bombay."
"The present is actually 2005, which was when these dance bars were being shut down. I read about how these women were pushed into prostitution, actually by the state. It was the same with children. They're not allowed to work if they're less than 14 but they're put into juvenile homes, which make criminals out of them. So you question the state, which is making these laws without any support system."
"In 'Bombay Rose', I took this to another level where forget touching, they don't even speak with each other. It is only in the end when you know that they are not going to be together, everything happens."
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