Animated short films in India, have been in vogue for sometime now and for all the good work. National award winner, independent filmmaker and animator Abhishek Verma’s animated shorts have raised the right voices for all the right causes. His latest work, Kitchen : The World Within is based on the theme of domestication and social conditioning of women towards kitchen.
The animated short film that went live with crowdfunding on 17 September has reached its target and raised more than the expected amount today, 15 November. Presented by The Matchbox.Co and Climb Media, the film is now slated for April 2020 release.
An ecstatic Verma exclaimed, “Reaching the target for any animation short film is really tough. In this process we reached to around 3000 people through email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and even offline meetings. But it was not a single process, where the transaction happened. It was followed by numerous follow ups. But at the end of the day, we had 320 backers supporting an animated short film in India with Rs. 10,00,000. It’s fantastic and a very good start start to have converted 10 per cent of our social, personal and artistic audiences from India and outside. We have started a second round of crowdfunding with Rs. 14.75 lacs as the main target for a couple of days. As with the enormous love we have already reached to Rs. 12.20 lacs.”
Kitchen is a 10 to 12 minute hand drawn animation film that depicts the tale of Rama, an average Indian housewife who befriends a live 200-year-old, gigantic Sperm Whale, Mushi, brought by her husband and her father-in-law, to be cooked. Both of them develop a cordial bond and it inspires her to break away from the continuum of her cooking chores and explore the magical world that she yearns for.
The Sperm Whale stands as an analogy to the huge workload she or any woman shoulders in the process of taking care of the kitchen in her daily life. With the arrival of Mushi in her life, Rama gets a chance and encouragement to look beyond the four walls of the kitchen.
Now that the target is reached, Verma along with his team will be taking around six months to complete the film with all the processes running in parallel.
“We want our film reach all the festivals across India and the world for the first eight to nine months. Then we will plan to have our Indian distributor and international distributor in place to make Kitchen reach audiences soon. The approach would be modular. Indian rights to Indian territory international rights limited to country rights so that we can maximum reach and without delay,” added Verma.
Known for his thought stirring animated short films, Verma now has a full length feature in pipeline. It’s a story about manual scavenging in India called Manhole. Throwing a little light on the same the director said, “The research is done and the story is in place. It will be long form graphic novel and then an animation feature film. We are working with few industry mentors so that it can be developed well and comes in good shape in the long form. No funding is being secured, all the seed money is being sponsored by The Matchbox.co as of now.”
With Kitchen and Manhole, Verma surely has busy days ahead!
