Filmmaker Aditi Banerjee on breaking the idea of desire with ‘Love at 5th Floor’

Director and producer Aditi Banerjee’s Love at 5th Floor is a five-part multilingual series and has been crowd funded by over 100 people. Currently streaming on MX Player, the show is centered around the lives of three women in urban India in which the wife of a cheating husband, a young mother tempted by an online chatroom, and an older polyamorous woman explore the world of love, desire, friendship, and separation. The web series starring Dilnaz Irani, Rachna Gupta, Virginia Rodrigues, Vivek Kumar, Vaibhav Deep Chopra, Kafeel Jafri was officially selected at Montreal International Film Festival 2020, Toronto Film Channel-2020, Lift Off Global Network- Paris- 2020. It has also won two awards, Exceptional Merit at Depth of Field International Film Festival and Award of Excellence at WRPN Women’s International Film Festival. Banerjee says that the intention behind the series was to have a story about women, with lightness and normalcy. The women in the show are relatable, strong, vulnerable, and fallible and they break the stereotypes associated with both ‘modern’ Indian women and women who are homemakers, she said. In an interview with Firstpost, the filmmaker says that the series is a small step towards equal representation of women on and off-screen and her urge to find her voice in writing fiction. Excerpts from the interview: The series has been crowdfunded by 100+ people. Is it right to say that the internet has helped you make this project a success story? The idea behind crowdfunding is to create ownership of the work with many people and allow myself some creative freedom even with a limited budget. This project happened after I had worked on commissioned films for over a decade. I had a strong urge to find my voice and test myself with writing fiction. The crowdfunding campaign was surprisingly successful. The campaign was slated to run for a month but we met our target in the first week! It was an unconventional route, but it is also this that has kept me motivated to complete the work and put it out despite many ups and downs. The internet is a brilliant resource. People reached out and contributions came from unexpected quarters. This project belongs to all those people too. Apart from the crowdfunding aspect, the internet-enabled me to work with my sound designer, musician, and songwriter online during COVID lockdown. Do you think that the world of the internet especially after the pandemic has come like a savior for talents like you? Absolutely. I have done some work for television in the past and I love the fact that the internet has broken a big barrier of production and distribution, especially for younger and relatively unknown filmmakers. This is a democratization of filmmaking. The show centered around the lives of three women in urban India. Are there any real-life references? The series is a mix of inspiration from real life, imagination, and observation of the world around me. The biggest inspiration came from living in an apartment complex and the curiosity it aroused about the fact that each apartment may be identical, but each story within is so different. That also influenced the fact that people speak in different ways, with different languages and accents. The process of pre-production involved rehearsals with the actors and including their inputs in bringing the characters to life. I have made documentary films and have a strong leaning toward research and realism. I spent time speaking to young mothers, being in various online chatrooms, attending some polyamorous group meet-ups, and exploring what intimacy meant to women in urban India. The other major inspirations have been Alain De Botton’s book- ‘The Course of Love’ and Keislowski’s Dekalog. How does the show break stereotype associated with modern Indian women? In my view, there is a bias towards looking at women as being defined by the roles they play in society- as a daughter, mother, wife, etc. And the idea of desire on screen is often explored outside the domestic space (though this is slowly changing now). For example, we rarely see older women with sexual desires or mothers with sexual desires or working woman who is powerful yet vulnerable. This show attempts to break some of that for instance, the polyamorous woman is a sari-wearing, Carnatic music-listening Physics professor and the young mother Ikjot struggles to love her child at times and is not always the perfect mother. What do you want to convey through the series? I want to create a pause, a moment of reflection, moments of connection with the characters, questioning some beliefs around what is right and wrong, and look at the greys. I wish for people to look at women as complex beings with desires and conflicts of their own. The series was officially selected at many international events. How important are such recognitions? I think it is rewarding and wonderful for international festivals to show short web series. It gives validation to filmmakers working outside the industry. I don’t think it necessarily makes things easier. This has taken time to come out and there have been a number of challenges. What next after this series? Many things! I like to do multiple things and am constantly looking to challenge myself. I know this is just the beginning. There is an original idea for a series that I developed for a platform last year, then there is a desire to work and collaborate more- especially on stories around relationships. I particularly like series such as Modern Love and wish to work on something like that (to be clear, this is a wish, and not anything concrete). Apart from making, the other thing I love is to enable other people to tell their stories. So I teach filmmaking and am currently doing a story/screenplay writing workshop with an Adivasi community in Jharkhand and hope to do one in Arunachal soon. Nivedita Sharma’s work experience includes covering fashion weeks in Milan, Pakistan, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Dubai, and award functions like IIFA, and TOIFA.  Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .