Tuesday 5 April 2016

Gutthi Short Film Review

 [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuefGFDAChQ]


Go watch this fantastic film before we talk about short films. You already did? Great!!! So...
If you have ever wondered if you like the format you must check out the above movie Gutthi.

Gutthi is just one of the examples of how interesting short film-making can be for an audience. While it snips off all the essential "Bollywood" elements of song and dance, it centers on the story.

About Gutthi (The Riddle)

In this modern world, there are many ways of voyeurism that we have access to without landing in the jail. There are the movies of course, and there are the numerous Youtubers who let us into the world where we can look at their house, their lifestyle, their minds and them. But those who welcome us to look are boring, their life is scripted. Writers have forever known where to go look for stories. They take the raw cut stories from real people who are not aware they are being observed.

This movie introduces us to a new kind of voyeurism that might not cross our minds, the kachrawala (garbage collector) who has access to everything we throw away. But what we discard is also what we owned thus allowing the one who can access it a part of ourselves. (Did a germophobe die somewhere?)

One more reason I have chosen Gutthi is it lets us into the mind of the storyteller... How the plot moves back and forth in the writer's mind and how sometimes the ending can be a surprise to the writer themselves. I also liked the fact that the characters speak Dakhani, a dialect of Urdu (despite the filmmaker being a Bengali, Abhishek Chatterjee,) rather than the pan-Indian Hindi that mainstream commercial Hindi cinema uses. Of course, the most important factor is the fast-paced unfolding of this story, which I always say is half the story.

Go check out more movies from various filmmakers who post on their channel. If you are looking for the channel for the above short film, here you go, Pocket Films, they have short films in many Indian languages, as well as English.

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