Director Ravi Muppa’s 25-minute debut short Incognito, opens with a man and a woman in an intimate moment, seen in the blurry invasion of a CCTV camera. We are the first voyeurs. The second is the hotel manager who captures these vulnerable moments of his residents to put them on porn sites for some extra bucks. One day, via a spy cam, he sees a young girl trying to escape through the bathroom window. Is she in trouble? Will he risk himself in helping her?
“I had read a news article about a flight attendant who had saved a girl who was being trafficked,” says Ravi, reminiscing about what germinated the idea for the film. “There was not much detail in it as to how it all went down, but enough to make me curious. At the same time there were also these reports coming up about hidden cameras being found in hotel rooms and bathrooms. It bothered me a bit and I felt like maybe these two things can come together and in a strange concoction this film was born.”
Incognito is the first movie to feature on producer Ranjan Singh’s Flip Films’ page Oh Short Flips, dedicated to short films. The film is presented by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane. Ranjan and Anurag are also the executive producers for the feature version of the film which is currently under development. “I had a concept but I started writing a short film as a way to prove that I can direct the feature version. But there is always this risk of making something which might seem like more of a scene from the feature than a self-contained film. I also discovered so much more about the world and the characters when I was writing the short.”
Ravi says that making a short first for the feature you are considering can serve as a good marketing tool. “In the tech world they make a minimum viable product and they test it out with the audiences, it’s kind of like that. Even if it is just for the festival audience, the short can get your idea across to so many different types of people and along the way you might also attract some champions for the film.”
The director also went on to talk about the challenges he faced while trying to put the short together. “I mean not The Odyssey level challenges,” he says with a laugh. “But I did encounter people with quirks which stalled the production a bit. When people read the script, there was some reluctance. Some of them even went so far as to say that this sounds like porn and it is very offensive to us that you have sent this.”
The feedback, however, didn’t deter Ravi. “I think I doubled down on it. Initially, I was a little reluctant to explore some things but then I decided, ‘You know what? this is what the story wants to be.’”
He also listed the influences for the film. “Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation was something that I had in my mind, more for the feature though than the short. Stylistically, there was this movie called You Were Never Really Here with Joaquin Phoenix. That was something that we looked at for the lighting, the camera design and the camera movements.”