Grief, whilst being a universal experience is celebrated, acknowledged, revered and ritualised in hugely diverse ways across different cultures and is a pure human experience which filmmaker Pulkit Arora wanted to explore as he grieved the loss of his home in India upon emigrating to New Zealand. His heart-wrenching short Anu is fiercely effective in its contained simplicity, conveying swathes of sentiment with next to no dialogue and set within the drab confines of a hotel room whose lack of space led to some creative cinematographic choices. Arora embraces the silence which reverberates throughout the liminal space of the film’s setting and envelops its mourning widow in a thick blanket of loneliness as she is forced to reckon with her grief alone, interrupted only by the arrival of lacklustre food packages. After completing a successful festival run, Anu arrives on DN’s pages for its online premiere alongside our interview with Arora in which we discover how he struggled to find the right actor from a keenly underrepresented group in cinema for his captivating lone protagonist, the wide-ranging welcoming pool of talent and equipment he was able to take advantage of in New Zealand and how he managed to land an enviable home for Anu on global streaming platform MUBI.
This heartbreaking tale is dripping in authenticity and lived in experience, where did Anu originate?
I wrote the film during my own fraught, mid-pandemic immigration from India to New Zealand. In the beginning of 2020, I had strong anchors in Mumbai – a home with a partner, a semblance of a writing career, a sense of normalcy. By the end of the year, all those things had suddenly disappeared, and I found myself quarantining for two weeks in a hotel room on my own before a fresh start in a new country. So I suppose I wrote a film about grief and displacement because I was grieving and being displaced. Write what you know et cetera.
The choice to situate that experience in the perspective of a middle-aged Indian woman came from observing my mum, how tightly interwoven her life is with my father’s, and wondering what they would be like in the absence of the other. The fascination with rituals came from observing my own adherence to routines, and realising how they are essentially prophecies of repetition – a way to manifest something internal by attempting to achieve something external. None of these clarities were found immediately, of course. The first drafts fixated on the protagonist’s relationship with a nurse at the quarantine facility, and their attempt to teach themselves English so they could speak with their New Zealand family. But eventually, with the help of some generous readers and mentors, I found the story in its current form.
I suppose I wrote a film about grief and displacement because I was grieving and being displaced. Write what you know et cetera.
How did you eventually settle on the emotional journey we see play out in the film and can you explain your process for getting to that point?
I had the luxury of time. No one was asking for a draft, no one holding me to a deadline. It gave me an opportunity to come back to the screenplay every few months, try different paths, ask different questions – did I want this film to focus on her displacement or her grief? How could I translate that grief into action? How could I prevent the heavy, well-trodden subject turning the film bathetic? I also had the invaluable assistance of two screenplay labs in New Zealand with Show Me Shorts and PASC Shortcuts. Everyone has loved and lost someone, so I always got to hear deeply personal perspectives on the film from my mentors or my peers. I also read as much as I could about the grief of others, and all of those voices eventually coalesced into the film we have.
Once everything was in place how did you move into the making of the film?
At first I intended to make this film like I made my first short Milk Toffee, which is with a budget of Subway sandwiches and a crew of friends. Problem is, I had no friends in New Zealand (yet). Then, miraculously, Milk Toffee ended up playing at Tribeca in 2021 and legitimized me as a filmmaker somewhat (funny how that works). I met Producer Rachel Fawcett and pitched her this short, and she chose to come onboard even though I was twenty minutes late – there was a crash on the motorway, I swear! It took another year or so to raise funding, both through institutional sources and a crowdfunding campaign, and another year to find a hotel that would let us light a fire in a room, cast an actor from a severely deficient demographic, and get a crew together.
We started shooting exactly two years after I arrived in New Zealand, which is also the same day I began writing the film. What’s lovely about New Zealand is that you have access to some incredibly skilled people even on a short film, as people are generally more accessible in a country this small. We had people on our film who had just come off some of the country’s most premium productions, and they took our film as seriously as they took the big projects. Cinematographer Adam Luxton, who was an integral part of finding the visual language for the film, had just come off a big series and basically had zero time between that and Anu. He claims to have forgotten his children’s names by the end of production.
The real challenge was to work with a sparse, relatively unadorned room, and find ways to shoot it meaningfully with what we had.
We had the gall to book an Arri Alexa 35, which generated files so heavy that it caused a bit of a panic with the DIT. We found out that Taika Waititi’s team on Time Bandits was having the same issues with the camera, so we were in august company there. The new sensor was incredible, obviously – we knew that the tech was never going to be the bottleneck. The real challenge was to work with a sparse, relatively unadorned room, and find ways to shoot it meaningfully with what we had.
Post was interesting as I was splitting time between NZ and India by then; the sound design and mix were done in India. I found myself recording voices of priests and sounds of crowds in the middle of rural India and feeding them back to the editor in Auckland to use, so it was a bit of an adventure. It felt fitting that a story about a woman torn between two places was realized through being torn between two places.
When she hung up the phone and simply sat with the feeling, simmering, she looked entirely truthful.
While we do hear recorded voices this is essentially a stunning dialogue free performance from Prabha Ravi. How did you find her as you mentioned there being a lack of representation for this type of character?
I essentially travelled around New Zealand accosting women my mother’s age and convincing them to act as if they had lost their husband. It was a strange time. Prabha responded to a callout I had posted on a Facebook Group. Her audition was simple: I would leave the camera rolling on her, leave the room, and then call her on her phone. On the phone, I would play the employee of the airline she just travelled with, calling to inform her that we’d lost her suitcase – a suitcase that contained the last of her deceased husband’s belongings. She was meant to simply react to the news. Her reaction initially rang false to me – it was too big, too Bollywood. But when she hung up the phone and simply sat with the feeling, simmering, she looked entirely truthful. That became the talisman for her performance from that point on: not big outbursts of sorrow, but the moments right after as the tide recedes.
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How did you two then work on her truly affecting performance, in particular, that chaotic moment of pure grief with the fire alarm and sprinklers going – it is an incredibly powerful scene.
The film is told in cuts, forty scenes in fourteen pages. This meant that Prabha was never having to inhabit emotions in continuous flow – only one at a time. This actually simplified her task, as she always had simple directions for each short scene, which would accumulate into something more complex in montage. In fact, it became important to make sure she wasn’t spelling out her emotional progress too explicitly because that’s the job of the cut.
Fun fact: Prabha was so afraid that the fire would burn her while she had her eyes closed that she needed no direction to look harrowed in that final scene. What’s on her face is just unbridled terror. Another fun fact: we couldn’t let the hotel carpet get wet from our fake sprinkler, so the carpet under her in the scene was torn off and stolen from the floor of my own apartment. My apologies to my landlord.
I can only imagine the reactions of hotels to the proposal, did you have a plan B in place and how did you eventually find the right accommodating location?
We would have attempted to make it work with a studio apartment where we hid the kitchen, but I was insistent on it being an actual hotel to get the details right – it’s actually quite hard to replicate the depressing plastic-kitsch of a mid-range corporate hotel. By the end I must’ve looked at 30 of them all over Auckland. If you’re ever in town and you need a budget hotel referral, I’m your guy. It was a miracle that the final hotel agreed. Perhaps it was the fact that the film was centering an Indian protagonist – the hotel is Indian-owned and run – or just that we were always honest with them about what we were hoping to achieve. But eventually we won their trust and didn’t question why.
I love the injection and use of technology in this story of displacement and loss. Did you struggle at all with how to capture those parts of the production?
The good thing about having all exposition delegated to non-diegetic sound is that you have immense freedom to tweak things in post. The bad thing is also that you have immense freedom to tweak things in post. I mucked around with the content and the cadence of the voice notes until the very last day of the edit, never quite sure when it was truly done. Anu’s husband’s voice is my father’s, her apathetic son’s voice is mine. The hard voice to capture was the Priest’s, who was an actual priest based in rural India. I recorded the final versions for him at 1 AM in a hospital in Uttarakhand, because that was the only time he was free, and it was the only place near his house that was quiet. Who knew Priests work this hard?
Tell us about the planning and shot construction to make this very plain corporate hotel room pulse with emotion and purpose.
What we lacked in latitude, we built in longitude. A lot of our more evocative shots are mounted on a jib arm shooting from above, which was intended to embody a floating, bodiless perspective – the deceased husband, perhaps. The other important thing was to build a consistent internal language within the film, coming back to the same compositions with only one thing changed so there was a demarcation of progression (or regression, in some cases). We chased clarity of intent over beauty in each frame and trusted that it would translate. Much of this should be credited to Adam Luxton, who actually found a way to manifest it all onto a camera sensor. As I mentioned, he had just come off a big series shoot and was severely underslept and sunburnt. God knows what he can achieve with a camera when he’s actually rested.
We chased clarity of intent over beauty in each frame and trusted that it would translate.
How did you manage the edit split over two continents keeping the pace, intention and surety of your story?
The first two years of my life in New Zealand were spent remotely running writing rooms in India, so frankly I was used to the straddling of continents and timezones. It was also nice to have an Indian person’s perspective on the film after building the majority of it in New Zealand. Sound Designer Bashab Bhattacharjee noticed things in the voice note soundscape that only someone who’d grown up in India can. The tough thing was to figure out how to help the film find an audience, as there is no precedent for a film made in these split circumstances. Luckily with its selection and wins at NZIFF and MIFF it was able to get on the map and have a substantial festival run.
As all filmmakers know distribution can be a fierce mountain to surmount, huge congratulations on MUBI, can you tell us how that came to be?
It came down to an email and some good luck. I was about to attend NFDC Film Bazaar, which is a major film symposium and market in India. I found out that our film was selected in their curated Recommends section quite close to the event, so I had no time to plan a strategy or set up meetings. I wrote only one email, which was to Svetlana Naudiyal of MUBI Asia-Pacific. It helped, I think, that the film was alphabetically first up in the brochure. Miraculously, Svetlana watched the film, liked it, and championed it to the platform from there on. Had she not done so, it is unlikely we would have found a way in. Moral of the story: always shoot your shot, and try and title your film with a word that starts with A.
You have done a fabulous job with Anu, what’s next for you?
I am currently midway through the vast transitory expanse between making shorts and making my first feature film. I wake up, feed myself, churn some pages out, and go to bed. Hopefully, I will get to direct something soon (open to pitches and hires!) but until then, I’m writing my way in.
