A combination of documentary and fiction, Malayalam short ‘Sha Sa Ha’ speaks of living in the pandemic
The Hindu
Making the film was a therapeutic experience for Kochi-based filmmaker, Ratheesh Ravindran
Like many others, being confined during lockdown was not easy for cinematographer Ratheesh Ravindran. As days turned to weeks and weeks to months, the seeming endlessness of it made work seem a distant possibility. The uncertainty got to him. That is when a friend and, eventually, producer Sharmila Nair suggested that he use the time to make a film. “The subject was obvious — lockdown and how it affected people,” he says of Sha Sa Ha, his 40-minute ‘docu-fiction’, currently streaming on Nee Stream. Since getting out to shoot was not an option, he scoured through old footage that he hadn’t used for his films. “I had kept them as I didn’t know how to structure it [the footage]” he says. He intended the film to move between the past (2013) and the present. In order to place the footage in the current context, he asked the ‘subjects’ to film themselves and share the video since he couldn’t travel. “All of that has been shot on smartphones, unlike the earlier footage.”More Related News