It's all In your Head

This is my love letter to the cinema of Sean Baker and Richard Linklater.
I found foreign films that spoke to me when I was 19, heartbroken, angry, and alone. People weren’t able to reach out to me. But sitting alone in a room, coming-of-age films spoke to me. In movies, I saw other people like me, dealing with conflicts I was dealing with, something I didn’t get from my immediate reality. These films talked to me, understood me, made me laugh, cry and above all help me make sense of chaos. Ever since the only dream I have had is to do the same for someone in my shoes when I was 19 but for people around me, something local.

At, 27, when I embarked on the journey to make my debut feature, I wanted to take all the conflicts of the internet age in an orthodox society that I have struggled through throughout my 20s and put them on screen so that somewhere someone sees them and hopefully finds something that resonates with them.

When I met the sisters, I realised our stories were similar even though we had extremely different lives. We had faced similar hurdles of stigma and failure, just because we chose to live our lives a certain way, paying a heavy cost emotionally and financially.
Feeling suffocated by living our lives in two conflicting realities we wanted to legitimise our choices by telling our story. Story of young people with rural orthodox roots exposed to more liberal ideas and ways of life during college and jobs
( for which they have to move to a different state) because of those around them and the internet. They naturally find themselves in sync with these ideas as they allow them to express them freely and individualistically but also make them stand out in society, breaking away from the values of family and conventional morality which results in conflict within themselves and with their roots and history.

But we didn’t want to explore the fight between the orthodox and the modern and justify one way of life over the other. We wanted to explore what comes after, once liberal ideas are not just ideas but a way of life for you. What are the nuances of this way of life? What are the conflicts? Hence, we are interested in exploring the ingredients that constitute their urban life and the conflict(emotional, romantic, financial) that arise in their personal life in their homes, not as a member of society but as individuals in their private spaces.

We also wanted to stay away from moments of catharsis and build the film around incoherent banalities with emphasis and focus on factual truths of culture and lifestyle. Hence the movie is a series of these moments(incoherent banalities), taken directly from real life and recreated with an emphasis on the authentic representation of physical reality, the emotional reality of these individuals.

The central characters of this film are fools who are dreaming and struggling and fighting without any help from anyone. We make this film in hope that those fighting alone, can see some bits of themselves in these characters and find representation and connection.