India is currently witnessing a very small but powerful indie movement with many new films making it big at international film festivals. One film to join this bandwagon is Kshay, an intense psychological study of a woman’s obsession with an unfinished statue of the Goddess Lakshmi. The film just won the ‘Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature’ at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA). Shot in stark black-and-white, starring theatre actors Alekh Sangal and Rasika Dugal, the film has travelled to 4 international film festivals already with many more in the offing.
Says Shaan Vyas, producer of Kshay “Kshay has taken us 4 years to complete and was made with a two-man crew at most times – the director Karan Gour and DOP Abhinay Khoparzi. When I say a two-man crew, nobody can even come close to knowing how difficult that can be. It’s a film about obsession made by an obsessive person. More importantly, the larger issues it addresses of materialistic obsession and blind faith in religion are very relevant in today’s world. And the fact that it probably has the lowest budget of all the feature films at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles makes this win that much more exciting. It reinforces our belief that you don’t need big budgets to make a good movie. 4 years of Karan and Abhinay’s relentless effort is paying off now.”
In recent times, World Cinema has witnessed a resurgence of powerful black-and-white films, most notably the recent successes like The Artist and the Berlinale Golden Bear-winner Caesar Must Die (which is mostly in black-n-white). 2012 seems to be the year most audiences are opening up to black-and-white and the filmmakers of KSHAY are very keen to know how Indian audiences would react. The film is slated for a theatrical release in India under the PVR Directors Rare initiative. For more information on the film, visit www.kshay-thefilm.com
