Interview: Ajitpal Singh's Rammat Gammat To Premier At International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany

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Writer-director Ajitpal Singh is a busy man these days. He is all excited for his short film Rammat Gammat (My Best Friend's Shoes) that will be making its world premiere in official competition at the very prestigious 64th edition of of International Short Film festival Oberhausen, Germany held from May 3-8, 2018.

Written and directed by Ajitpal Singh, the Gujarati-
language-short- film is among 37 shorts selected in the Children's and Youth Film
Competition. Singh who had an interesting childhood where his father ran a cinema hall knew that film making would be his calling. He was selected for Sundance India Screenwriter Lab in 2012. and was the youngest member of Indian delegation at Munich Film Festival 2009.

He catches up with BWW on regional cinema in India and how Indian audiences have always appreciated a good story

Tell us more about Rammat Gammat, the idea, inspiration and conceptualization.

I had a very interesting childhood, I grew up in the villages first in Punjab and then in Gujarat. I always wanted to tell a story set up in the villages and how is it to grow up in a village. On one hand you have nature - it's abundance and beauty but on the other hand you have discrimination in the name of caste and religion. As a child you don't understand such boundaries, but the adult world teaches you to segregate and discriminate. Can an innocent friendship survive the complex world of prejudices? This question lead us to develop a simple story with complex characters.

You are directing a regional film and that two with two first time actors. Did you feel at any stage that there was a risk

The beauty of making a short film is that you can take risk. It's small scale, the budges are limited and it's going to have online release. For this reason it has always been the short films that have found newer ways to tell a story. I was always fearless and ready to fail, but not quit on my ideas about how a film should be.

For the longest time films in India meant typical Bollywood love stories with superstars and foreign locales, how do you think the tone of film viewing changes and people began looking at real stories on reel

There has been never a dearth of real stories on reel, whether it was the popular Mother India or critically acclaimed Pather Panchali, some of the best filmmaker in India have made films dealing with the reality. I have always wondered why good cinema in India fails to get the audiences, and I don't know the answers. What I know is that it is not the fault of the audience, nobody is going to eat a dish that is not being served properly. When every Friday a big budget movie is promoted with the PR budget that is 20 times more than the budget of a good indie film, who is going to come and watch an indie film?