An Asian immigrant in Dubai who can’t speak English, a Mumbai woman battling separation, and a young Bengali revolutionary tasked with spilling blood on Kolkata streets — Prataya Saha’s short films take only 5 to 11 minutes to capture history, heritage, hustle, and alienation in big cities. They have become hot favourites at the Oscars and BAFTA qualifying festivals and New York Asian Film Festival.
It’s the winter of 1924, and there is gunpowder in Calcutta’s air, as two men meet stealthily near a ghat. One of them, just out of his teens, has a copy of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s revolutionary novel Anandamath open. The other, with his face covered with a shawl, asks: “Parbi (Can you)?” The young man walks away in a huff: He has been asked to kill a little girl’s father, a British informer. Can the young revolutionary make the hard choice between punishment and forgiveness?
In the five-minute run of 1924, Saha takes viewers back to early 20th-century Calcutta and brings a slice of the city’s armed revolutionary history alive. Describing it as a neo-noir, experimental short film, Saha, 38, says you don’t need hours to tell a tale, just a couple of minutes and the skill and passion to make short films. His seventh production in his six-year filmmaking career, 1924 will hit the international film festival circuits this month.
“1924 deals with issues that are as relevant today as they were before India won its freedom, the iron grip of power and the women and men corrupted by it, and the need to fight it at great personal cost for the greater good,” Saha told ThePrint. “Unlike some of my old films, for 1924, I had to recreate the city by going back in time. It takes you only five minutes to watch the film, while it took me two days to conceptualise, write the script and shoot it. The trick is to practise the art of telling a story in a short time and know a city intimately.”
The big city as muse
The big city is a central trope in Saha’s films — its history, heritage, daily hustle and many stories hidden in its lanes and bylanes fascinate the filmmaker who was born and grew up in 1980s Calcutta.
While 1924 is about Calcutta of yore, the 11-minute Shonar Khacha-The Golden Cage (2023) is about a family tackling financial hurdles and debating the sale of their old, ancestral house in northern Kolkata to a builder. Beyond the drama that unfolds, Shonar Khacha is about heritage conservation in older parts of the city.
“As I take my strolls through the skinny alleys of this beautiful city, I often stop and look longingly at the remains of what was — palatial buildings now in ruins and art deco houses that would have been preserved in any modern city as gateways to the past but are sadly neglected here,” Saha says.
Growing up in a middle-class joint family as a single child, Saha left for Bangalore to study engineering and have a go at a “normal life with a nine-to-five job”. But his desire to embrace the city through moving images made him leave corporate life and turn to filmmaking.
Saha’s films, though, are not just about Kolkata.
“I feel [that] in any city in the world, there is this contrast between the noise, news, and hustle on one side and the darkness and loneliness that lie just beneath the surface on the other. I strive to capture this contrast of light and shadow as well as the inner struggles of my characters as they navigate the cityscape,” Saha says.
In the 2021 short film Just Another Day, Saha looks at the life of a woman in her 40s, just separated from her partner, as she navigates her day in the din and bustle of Mumbai. The multiple award-winning film deals with abuse, depression, and the stigma around divorced women in the city.
“Growing up, I would observe that rules for female members of the house were different than those for the men. Just Another Day is about societal indifference to domestic abuse and how patriarchy continues to affect the mental and physical health of the woman even in a modern, cosmopolitan city like Mumbai,” Saha says. Anshulika Kapoor, who played the lead role, says the film stands out because of the freedom and space Saha gives his actors to explore the nuances of the characters. “He is also technically very sound,” she says.
Saha’s most famous production so far, though, is an 11-minute film about immigrants who could never really make it in the big city — Mein Mehmood. The film looks at the life of Mehmood, a middle-aged man who relocated to Dubai, dreaming of a better life. But Mehmood can’t speak English and is unable to do business with prospective clients, which puts his job on the line. “There is a Mehmood in all of us who have left home for the big city. Some of us are simply lucky enough to hide our insecurities before the world,” Saha says.
At the time of the film’s release, IndiaTimes gave 1924 3.5 stars out of 5 and wrote: “Saha’s Mein Mehmood is a thought-provoking short film that sheds light on the challenges faced by immigrants in a foreign land, emphasising the importance of language and the harsh realities of ageing. It successfully invites viewers to reflect on societal norms and the toll they take on individuals like Mehmood, making it a compelling and worthwhile watch.”
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Influences and awards
Saha says the format of short films always attracted him, drawn by reading literary greats like Guy de Maupassant, Rabindranath Tagore, and Leo Tolstoy during the summer holidays in Kolkata in the ’90s. Such was their influence on Saha, then 13 years old, that by the end of middle school, he had scribbled numerous short stories and poetry on old diaries.
Since then, Saha has only nurtured his sense of filmmaking.
“Short storytelling requires a certain skill and understanding as you have limited time to express yourself,” he says, adding that it makes the medium challenging for an artist as there is no room for error.
Success didn’t come easy for Saha. The filmmaker says that just as readers were indifferent toward short stories once, viewers, too, didn’t pay much attention to short films. “Over time, as my films found their way into major platforms, I witnessed a shift in perspective, with people recognising the depth and complexity of short-form storytelling,” he says.
The shift came with the awards. When Mein Mehmood won the award for Best Short Film at the Kolkata International Film Festival in 2022, a big crowd gathered outside the venue, waiting for Saha.
Internationally, his films have qualified for Oscars and BAFTA. Just Another Day was the only Indian film to make it to the 2021 edition of the New York Asian Film Festival. Saha was felicitated by the governor in Turkey and the film was specially curated by Indiana University, US. “I toured with my shorts in the UK’s theatres and community centres. People would come up to me and say it is great to finally watch such Indian shorts,” he says.
The Golden Cage, also a theatrical release in California, played alongside Oppenheimer in 2023. “A Bengali short film shared space with a global blockbuster in the same theatre; I couldn’t have asked for more,” Saha says.
Film critic Ano Patel says Saha’s shorts mirror our modern realities, sometimes through the struggles of the commoner, other times through ignored truths. “What is interesting about Saha is that he chooses his subjects carefully, then writes powerful stories around them, and through his mastery of the craft, puts out finely crafted shorts with minimum dialogues,” Patel says.
In the age of shrinking attention span of viewers, Saha is optimistic about the future of shorts. “This is the age of 90-second reels. Soon, feature films and even OTTs will begin to have shorter run times. And there is so much talent in India for shorts. Films by contemporary Indian filmmakers like Devashish Makhija, Reema Sengupta, and Abhiroop Basu have been a great source of inspiration for me,” he says.
Despite the recognition, Saha finds it challenging to finance shorts, which are often driven more by passion rather than commercial considerations. “Most of my short films have been financed by new and emerging production houses that are venturing into the world of filmmaking. Shorts offer an attractive option for these production houses as they require relatively lower investment compared to feature films and provide an ideal environment to build a team and showcase talent,” he says.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)