Prateek Vats’ Chronicles of a Confession Lands Cineroost as Producer Alongside Payal Kapadia, Anurag Kashyap

Eeb Allay Ooo! director Prateek Vats' next film, Chronicles of a Confession, has found Kavita Gupta's US-based Cineroost as its producer. The company joins existing executive producers Payal Kapadia and Anurag Kashyap on the project. Filming begins in early November. Written by Vidur Nauriyal, Vats and Shubham, the drama centers on a Kashmiri shawl seller who confesses to a crime he didn’t commit, kicking off a series of events nobody saw coming. The script was selected for Busan's Asian Project Market in 2023.

Kashyap, who presented Vats’ first film, admitted to Variety he was jealous of the script. “I almost want to steal it. And since I can’t, I have jumped on board as an executive producer,” Kashyap said. “It is an honor to associate with someone as great as Payal Kapadia who I have seen sticking to her voice and her ground as a filmmaker and then there is my own producer Ranjan Singh. What was there in this to not want to be part of it.”

“Prateek’s films mix humor and political commentary in a unique way which I have always admired. And this new project takes this to an even higher level,” Kapadia said. Anand Bansal, who shot Achal Mishra's films Gamak Ghar, Dhuin and Konkona Sen Sharma's The Mirror, serves as the DP. Ranjan Singh of Flip Films produces alongside Dubai’s Action Filmz, India’s Etched Films and Khan & Kumar Productions. Vats broke out with his 2019 award-winning narrative feature debut Eeb Allay Ooo!, an absurdist political satire that screened in Berlinale’s Panorama section.

“‘Chronicles of a Confession’ has been brewing for some years and I am thrilled that it is going on floor now,” Vats told Variety. “The film solidifies my collaboration with producer Ranjan Singh, who has been with me since my debut feature, ‘Eeb Allay Ooo!'”

“This film isn’t about conflict, it’s about how people negotiate the destabilising absurdities of everyday life in a conflict zone,” Vats shared with Screendaily in 2023. “It is a biting comedy arising from tragic truths that peeks into what ‘ordinary’ life looks like when collective trauma is ancient and never resolved.”

In a director's note available on the Asian Cinema Fund website, Vats added, "This film is not about conflict. It is about how people negotiate the destabilizing absurdities of everyday life in a conflict zone. The film, in many ways, is trying to understand a fundamental question: How does life in jail become a better option than living in “Paradise on earth”. To me the most apt way of telling this story is through a lens which is off kilter ? one that leans on humor as a “gesture of resistance” to tell stories of troubled times. I seek to take forward the work put into my first film Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) which is an absurdist political satire about a world where becoming a monkey is more liberating than staying human."