Before venturing into direction, director Ambiecka Pandit worked as a corporate lawyer. She studied film on the daily commute to work, a local train ride from Andheri to Churchgate. The tools were an early cinephile’s staple: YouTube and Google search. On those train rides, she remembers the films and filmmakers that inspired her: from A Separation (2011) by Asghar Farhadi to the works of Michael Haneke and The Dardenne Brothers. “After watching world cinema, my horizons widened. I learnt that there could be so many ways to approach a film,” says Ambiecka. “Just figuring out the permutation and combinations was so exciting.” The corporate gig was good money, she admits. “But after a while I realised that I can't do it anymore. I couldn’t be a filmmaker in theory. If I had to do it, I had to take the plunge.”
Hence, she quit, assisted in ads and ultimately made the short films Custody (2019) and Under the Waters (2022). Then came a big opportunity, a chance to direct an episode of the Netflix series Black Warrant being backed by Vikramaditya Motwane. “Sudip (Paatal Lok and Kohrra creator Sudip Sharma) saw my work on Black Warrant and also my short films before getting me on board for Babita Singh Reporting.”
Written by Amita Vyas, Babita Singh Reporting, isn’t merely an investigative thriller. It is also an internal, coming-of-age tale. The titular character, played with a blink-and-you-miss nuance by Nimisha Sajayan, is a desk cop who goes from Bhopal to her hometown Rewa and finds herself solving the murder of a childhood friend. But the film is not limited to the thrills of a who-dunnit, it expands to the journey of Baby and her transition to Babita. “She is somebody who is unsure of herself,” says Ambiecka as she describes the character. “She is so used to second guessing, afraid of a taunt or a backlash that she does everything hesitatingly.”
Even on a personal level, Ambiecka shares, she could relate to Babita’s character. “There are some parts of her in me. Every woman, from different financial or educational backgrounds, has been made to feel small and expected to not take up space,” she says. “This can be because of your appearance or anything else. All of us have been in an environment where we had to hesitate to make sure that other people are more comfortable.”
It was not just the writing, Nimisha’s performance also aided in ably portraying the timidness of Babita. “As a person, Nimisha is very optimistic. She likes to see the good in people and her face reflects that. She is not guarded and her eyes have that unassuming quality. We wanted that,” says Ambiecka on why they went for the actor to play the part. “She has an inner intelligence which we wanted to preserve.”
Although Babita Singh Reporting is about the journey of a woman, it is the male characters who have been intricately crafted as both the perpetrators and the victims of patriarchy. Babita’s best friend Bansi (played memorably by Barun Sobti), whose murder she is investigating, is both the central mystery and the central grief of the film. “My brief to Barun for the character was: ‘he is a dam that is overflowing’,” Ambiecka shares. “All his life, Bansi has tried his best to put other people before him. Much like Babita. But there comes a point where the water keeps rising, to the point that you can't breathe.”
The character of Babita’s husband Sharad (played by Anshumaan Pushkar) is a different product of patriarchy, but not in the obvious sense. He isn’t controlling or toxic on the surface. He is the good guy, the one who wants to be appreciated for doing the bare minimum. “Sharad is not exactly a dominating, alpha male. He actually is a caring husband, just that by the end of every fight he wants Babita to ultimately apologise,” explains Ambiecka. In an amusing scene, when Sharad loses an argument he starts crying, compelling the wronged Babita to actually comfort him. “He is manipulative without realizing it,” says Ambiecka.
The small town of Rewa, where the film is set, with its bright-coloured houses, also has a distinct quality. It stands apart from a stock small-town, shown in many OTT films and shows. “I remember discussing Joyland with my DOP Sunil (Borkar) a lot. It captured the small-town aesthetic well” says Ambiecka. “We didn’t want sanitized colours. We wanted to capture these bright pink, yellow, and blue painted houses.”
OTT projects seem to have an abundance of female-led narratives but the same isn’t reflected much on the big screen, which still seems to be an avenue for showcasing the mass male fantasy. We ask Ambiecka if she expects things to change. “Everything is based on the economics of return,” she explains. “Slowly, society is changing. Now people are willing to watch a film fronted by a female actor. There can be female stars in a way that people go and watch them to just enjoy their on-screen persona. But can it get the same budget as a movie led by a male superstar? For now, absolutely not.”
Since, so far Ambiecka has dealt with more solemn genres, we ask her if she would want a palette cleanse. Maybe a comedy? “I would love to do a black comedy,” she beams. “Or maybe a horror?”