Anup Singh is helming a short film, Lasya: The Gentle Dance.
Singh is best-known for his 2013 film, Qissa, starring Irrfan Khan, Tillotama Shome, Tisca Chopra and Rasika Dugal.
Singh will make his next feature after finishing the short.
Anup Singh, director of Qissa and The Song of Scorpions, is helming a new short film, Lasya: The Gentle Dance, shot on Mumbai’s streets, produced by Mumbai-based Pretty Pictures. Lasya: The Gentle Dance tells the tale of of a father and son who are beggars on the streets of Mumbai. The film captures their lives over a day as they struggle against monsoon rains that repeatedly destroy their shelter.
Anup Singh's Short Film, Lasya
“This will be a short film,” Singh told Variety. “It is for me an attempt, call it a desperate attempt, to see if in this time of AI, quick and violent action, and celebration of various demogogueries in storytelling, whether there is still a way to reaffirm cinema’s gentle ways of reaching us.”
The film is produced by Pretty Pictures, the Mumbai-based banner helmed by Zeeshan Ahmad and Pretty Aggarwal.
“Anup Singh’s work has always been about people on the margins,” Ahmad said. “His cinema has consistently insisted that their life not be documented only for the pain, but that the joys and the beauty of their life also be affirmed. We would like to support that vision in our work together.”
The project is in a new avatar. In 2017, Singh shared with Variety that he was about to make his next feature after The Song of Scorpions, reteaming with Irrfan Khan. Lasya was meant to be the third Singh-Khan collaboration after Qissa (2013) and The Song of Scorpions (2017). In 2011, the project was chosen for Locarno Film Festival's Open Doors programme. In this older iteration of Lasya, the film would have Khan play a man who plays a woman during ritualistic performances and discovers that he likes to play at being a woman in his everyday life too.
After this short film, Pretty Pictures aims to reunite with with Singh early next year on his next feature film.
“I like to challenge my audience’s identities,” Singh earlier told Variety in the 2017 interview. “And I like to challenge their preconceptions about how a story might go.”
