Humans of Someone

AUTHOR'S NOTE (Nitin Nath)

I grew up with my grandparents in a large, maze-like ancestral home of myths — Mom taught at a graduate school during the day while Dad worked abroad for most part of the year.
I could compare it to living in Disneyland after closing time.
.
Don’t get me wrong, I had the World’s Best Childhood if that’s a category at all. But one of the cutbacks of being a single child is that you’re expected to be autonomous by default.
You don’t get to intern at the Office of Figuring It Out, you’re CEO on Day 1.

So while grandpa and grandma navigated at a speed of 3 to 4 naps/day, I had to make sense of my time on my own. Sometimes that meant breaking things in the house, but sometimes it meant putting them back together.

For instance, if I didn’t have the summer vacation I wanted, I had to make one up. And if I didn’t like that one as much, I rewrote it until it became the exact vacation I wanted.

I think I stole the disease from my grandparents who remembered every incident a little differently from each other and from the last time they said it — how they first met, why she married this man, if they had a favourite song between them, where she’d go if she could go anywhere, how many cigarettes he’d smoked since morning, all of it dissimilar.

And I often wrote down these variations in a notebook just to see how far they’d stretch it, but I always picked the story I liked more.

Every one of us is a central character in the story of our lives.

Which is to say that there is no periphery.
We're all at the peripheries of someone else's existence.

Every one ‘is’ a different movie.
Welcome to 'Humans of Someone'.

Here's a first-look video of the film
► https://youtu.be/Xe_iPpNDz6Y

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DETAILED SYNOPSIS

A man gets obsessed with a filmmaker whose films become inextricably entwined with his own life, including his relationship with his long-time girlfriend, Sarah. While wandering the streets in a daze, a loopy idea strikes him – start filming this situation, and see what happens.

Sarah agrees to work with him as they navigate through several rehearsals, recording and rewriting real conversations along the way. Strange things occur when he starts infiltrating the scenes with personal histories and hang-ups.

Several disparate characters arrive and bury themselves deeper and deeper into a project that keeps spiralling out of control; after a while, this off-beat world begins to seem like a place any of us could inhabit forever.

Sarah senses something very wrong, and talks about leaving – but it’s too late for that. What happens next keeps happening, never repeating.

'Humans of Someone' unfolds like a fugue in which a borrowed world first stands in for the real world, then quietly replaces it and finally becomes indistinguishable from it.

A feverish portrait of a mind that won’t stand still.

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DIRECTOR'S NOTE (Sumesh Lal)

Humans of Someone (HOS) is a love story of strange madness.
Where 'someone' is anyone.

In retrospect, that sounds like an inside joke, considering we started shooting the film with just one person, and cast the others as we went along. 'Humans of Someone' was made with the heart of a child and the aches of a homemaker – over the course of a year and a half, across weekends and locations like a travelling circus camp.

Picture two Canon 5D Mark III cameras and a crew, the size of an urban household in India on a Diwali night (8 people at most).

The truth is that nobody asked us to make this film.
No one came saying – here’s the money, here’s the distribution network, here’s the satellite deal, now go make the film.
No.
But if we hadn’t made it, nobody else would’ve made ‘this’ film.

Isn’t that a great reason to go do what you want?
That if you don’t do it, nobody else will.
THAT thing will never be done in this world.

As the film suggests, 'rain may fall without you, but it’s never the same rain with you in it'.

And so here we are.
What used to be ‘our little secret’ is now yours.
As weird as that feels, it’s liberating.

Here's to the small forms of cinema: the journal, the poem, the painting, the footnote, the smile, the sigh, the little stories we tell each other.

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Here's a bunch of music videos featuring clips from the film.

‘one life stand’
► youtu.be/KaLmQtVcCwI

‘sound of memory’
► youtu.be/O3npIO_1rzA

‘hopelessly yours’
► youtu.be/aD_wwF6-s-0

We also shot some portraits to examine our supporting characters.

‘same sea, another season’
► https://youtu.be/GJvlDfiTozg

‘fresh lime blues’
► youtu.be/Z7ZOS_tGeog

‘nowhere home’
► youtu.be/0oxf20xJ46c

Thank you very much for your consideration.