‘I don’t have the desire to change my image,’ says Nandita Das after her new film Zwigato’s TIFF première

Nandita Das’ new film Zwigato recently premiered at TIFF and the actor is clear where her interest lies — filmmaking

In the mid-90s, Nandita Das was working with an NGO, after doing her masters in social work from Delhi University, when she was asked to audition for a “bold film” about two women. That was 26 years ago. Last week, Das and her co-actor in Fire, Shabana Azmi, reunited with their director Deepa Mehta in Toronto. The two actors were at the Toronto International Film Festival with the premières of their films — Zwigato, Das’ third film as a director, and Shekhar Kapur’s rom-com What’s Love Got to Do with It?, in which Azmi plays a supporting role.

Nandita Das calls herself a hesitant actor and director (despite helming three movies). But even when her acting career took off, she played the game the way she wanted to. “The choices I made freed me to work on my own terms,” she says. “Sometimes I did five films in a year, and at other times I didn’t work for a couple of years.” Along the way, she appeared in films directed by a range of master filmmakers: Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Mrinal Sen, Rituparno Ghosh and even Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Her only regret is that many people do not know her work.

All that might change with her new film, Zwigato, in which she has cast popular comedian and television talk show host Kapil Sharma along with Shahana Goswami.

Zwigato is the tale of a working-class couple coping with the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. After Manas (Sharma) loses his factory job, he becomes a food delivery man for a company called Zwigato, earning ₹15 per dispatch. Meanwhile, his wife Pratima (Goswami) gets a cleaning job in a mall. Manas is not happy with his wife’s work, perhaps because she earns more than him. The domestic pressures and the state of the economy merge into a moving human drama that only an activist at heart like Das could have made.

Read | Listen to Her, a short film by Nandita Das, exhorts women to break the silence on domestic violence

Instead of setting the film in Delhi or Mumbai, Das placed it in Bhubaneswar. She wanted to explore the city where her parents still live — a smart city with modern malls, high rise buildings, as well as small lanes and patriarchal attitudes. “When the pandemic started, I was talking to my friend Samir Patil, the CEO of Scroll [and a partner in her production company],” Das recalls. “We were talking about unemployment, whether the gig economy is a saviour or further creating problems, and the tussle between man and algorithm, as opposed to man and machine that [Charlie] Chaplin had captured in Modern Times [1936].” The film evolved out of this conversation.

“When you humanise these characters, then it’s not about the ratings and incentives [like the ones on Manas’ food delivery app],” she says. “It’s also about anxiety and the relentlessness of life. It’s about gender and class that intersect in that world.”