Will venture into feature-length films, web series this year
Avinash Lohana (MUMBAI MIRROR; March 10, 2016)
Two years after her first short film, Moi Marjaani, Anurag Kashyap's sister Anubhuti returns with another short, titled Call Waiting, with Margarita With a Straw actress Sayani Gupta in the lead. "It's written by Swati Bhattacharya who got in touch with me through Guneet Monga. The story is about a 20-something girl who's waiting for a call from her crush. It focuses on the growing importance of mobile phones in today's world through a love story," says Anubhuti, whose earlier short was about the Internet making inroads in small towns. Shot over one day, Call Waiting, boasts of an all-women crew and is narrated with a voiceover and sparse dialogues. "I tweaked the story a bit but kept it simple," Anubhuti reveals.
The new short is inspired by Dorothy Parker's A Telephone Call. "Even though the story was written at least a 100 years ago, it resonates with our times," insists Sayani who is all praise for her director, adding that they filmed in Versova without permission, but fortunately, the shoot went off smoothly. Sayani will next be seen in Nitya Mehra's Katrina Kaif-Sidharth Malhotra adventure drama, Baar Baar Dekho.
Meanwhile, Anubhuti is looking at graduating to feature films and web series this year. "The scripts are more or less ready. My first film is a rom-com while the seven-eight episodic series will be a comedy-drama," she informs. Will big brother Anurag hop on board as producer? "Not on my feature film debut, maybe later," she shrugs, happy to only avail of her more experienced sibling's feedback for now. "He's always praising me and I'm sure he'd love to produce all my films."