Ghar Se: Nimisha Sajayan stars in Mridul Nair's short film

The lockdown may have interrupted the big plans of several Malayalam filmmakers, but it hasn’t hampered their creativity. In the past three months, some of them engaged in brainstorming sessions to come up with ideas that can be pulled off within the pandemic-induced limitations. 

Filmmaker Mridul Nair, who directed the surprise hit B.Tech, starring Asif Ali, is one of them. Mridul secured the necessary permits and reached out to actor Nimisha Sajayan and cinematographer Jomon T John to shoot a short film in Hindi.

Titled Ghar Se, it was shot during the last days of the lockdown with a minimal crew comprising less than 20 members. “It’s a dark, intense subject,” says Mridul, who shot it in Hindi as he wanted to give it maximum exposure. “It has minimal dialogues and a slightly poetic narrative with old Hindi songs being a significant presence.” The team will release it online sometime this weekend.

Aside from Nimisha, Ambika Rao and Dinesh Prabhakar play the other main characters. Since all three actors are well-versed in Hindi, Mridul found it easy to make them deliver the dialogues. Nimisha was born and brought up in Mumbai, and Dinesh Prabhakar had some experience living in Mumbai. The latter was recently seen in the Amazon Prime series The Family Man. Ambika Rao was part of the films Kumbalangi Nights and Virus.

As for Mridul’s upcoming projects, he was planning to start work on a film called Thattum Vellattam with Asif Ali, Soubin Shahir, and Saiju Kurup. But since the film requires multiple locations and extras, Mridul has decided to wait until the pandemic situation improves.

Mridul has also completed a Malayalam web series titled Instagraamam. However, he has not yet found an OTT platform to release it, as he was told that there is no market for a web series in Malayalam. A confident Mridul feels it’s unfair to ignore content without even seeing it, even if the filmmaker behind it has made only one feature-length film so far.

“We came up with the web series idea a year ago, before everyone jumped on the OTT bandwagon, and we made it like a proper web series, for 60 days with the degree of specifications these platforms demand. They all say ‘Malayalam content is the best’, but when someone comes up with a web series, they don’t want to back it. They accept content from Tamil, Telugu or Kannada, but not Malayalam. I guess brand value matters when it comes to Malayalam content,” says Mridul.