Ali Fazal in ‘The Astronaut and His Parrot’ | photo Credit: –
In a short career, director Aarti Kadav has found a distinctive voice, spearheading a unique brand of minimalist Indian indie sci-fi. It’s a genre of filmmaking that’s always visible on the horizon but – like a saucer NoRefused to implement. Kadav’s films tend to be low-budget and low-fussy (though they consistently feature mainstream actors). She keeps her production design alive and open; With the right cutters and a trip to the local DIY store, you might as well make your own sci-fi movie. He’s not interested in studio support—or perhaps more accurately, the studios aren’t flocking to him.
This leanness of craft is also reflected in the storytelling of Kadav. She has the ability to break down characters and emotions to basic elements; He’s a gentle, confident, lo-fi sci-fi. In Goods (2019), her first feature, a busy space shuttle agent finds her hermetic solitude disrupted by an ever-familiar assistant. short length, 55 km/s, the lost lovers are reunited at the end of the world. His latest effort, astronaut and his parrotT—running just 15 minutes and shot on the iPhone 12 Pro Max—is even less, a poignant space as tender and as fleeting as life itself.
The Astronaut and His Parrot (Hindi)
director: Aarti Kadav
mold: Ali Fazal, Rio
Order: 15.34 min
Story: An astronaut makes one final connection and revisits his life in the wake of a devastating space accident
Birds have appeared briefly in Kadav’s earlier work. “There’s a pigeon in the spacecraft,” complained Vikrant Massey in bewilderment Goods, Now a parrot gets a starring role. After a horrific accident, astronaut Iqbal Ali (Ali Fazal) are stranded and wandering in space; When he buzzes Mission Control, the signal is lost. It is raised thousands of miles away in the city of temples on earth. With his oxygen rapidly depleting and not much hope left, Iqbal must make the most of his unlikely interlocutor – in this case, a rose-ringed parrot who can talk.
Read also: Into the afterlife: Aarti Kadav and Shweta Tripathi on their latest sci-fi film, ‘Cargo’
It is perhaps significant that the film does not begin with Iqbal or show us his accident. This would indicate a very different kind of space movie. astronaut and his parrot has thematic similarities with interstellar (2014). The film is clear about this fact; If anything, this is its strongest side, keeping roughly the same sentiments at 0.001% of the budget. Kadav, perhaps to seal the comparison, even throws in lens flares and a light drizzle of meteorite dust.
Elsewhere, she offsets the romantic gloom of Christopher Nolan’s film by introducing sunny counterpoints. There’s the odd central conceit of a man talking to a parrot (played by ‘Rio’, an Imtiaz Ali stalwart). There’s Ali Fazal’s beanie-and-magenta-spacesuit getup. And there’s Ali himself, one of those actors who hasn’t lost his boyishness despite a long career in films.
astronaut and his parrot Played at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal last year. It was recently screened at the Wench Film Festival in Mumbai. Led by Sapna Bhavnani, it is one of the few genre-forward festivals in the country; Of the 23 films screened, only a few were Indian, and Astronaut India’s only Sci-Fi title. This should not surprise anyone. There is no market yet for intelligent, low-key science fiction in India (Kadav’s next feature is a remake) The Great Indian Kitchen, The road ahead seems long and lonely. For now, it’s mainly indie for Indian sci-fi.