Food gets the flavour of freedom in Sulagna Chatterjee’s short Olakh. Starring Suhasini Mulay and Nikita Grover, the film is set to have its world premiere at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne (IFFM) on August 20. Set in the course of a rainy afternoon, the 21-minute short revolves around a recently widowed Mansi (Suhasini) and her recently heartbroken househelp Divya (Nikita). The women, from different age-groups and caste and class identities, bond and bloom over cooking and relishing a dish of chicken curry, getting a retaste of their forgotten selves in the process.
Sulagna shares that the lives of her mother and grandmother were the inspiration behind the short. “They are two different generations of women with their own share of challenges, struggles and victories but what brought them together was the amount of things they gave up for love.” Amongst other things, Sulagna says, what they jettisoned was their culinary preferences. “My mom stopped indulging in spicy food after her marriage, as my dad’s family had a sweeter palette. For my grandmother, she never thought about her own choice if the family had a consensus on what they wanted to eat,” reminisces Sulagna. A memorable scene in Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies (2023) about women’s choice when it comes to food triggered an impulse in her to write her own short. “I sat at a dingy bar one evening and just wrote. The first draft was called Mansi Joshi’s Special Chicken Curry,” she says.
Scripting was still the easier part. It, quite literally, took a village to make Olakh. The film is financed by 230 contributors who pitched in anywhere between Rs 1000 to Rs 1 lakh. Sulagna, however, says that crowdfunding wasn’t her first preference. “I initially reached out to a production house which was looking for short films and received a politely-worded rejection letter. Later, however, through sources I came to know that the film got snubbed because it showed non-veg food. I was angry but this wasn’t the battle I wanted to fight.”
It took about four months and multiple Instagram reels and posts for the film to get its budget. Sulagna says she wasn’t able to articulate what she went through during that time. “It was too stressful,” she shared. “You have to be a certain kind of individual to crowdfund a film. You have to put yourself out there, day after day and week after week for months and if you fail, it is for the world to watch.”
The finances, however, came in through and the film got made. “I was in the middle of a shot when the final Rs 1.5 lakh came in. That was some relief,” she says.
The title, ‘Olakh’, is a Marathi word which means identity. Sulagna says that via the film she wanted to take the kitchen, “the most oppressed space in an Indian household”, a place which robs women of their individuality, and turn it on its head. “What if you get freedom through the same food that has kept you in shackles?” she says. “I think the best revolutions happen through joyful stories.”