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Sky is the limit

photo R.V. MOORTHY

FOR A CAUSE Kaushik Roy

This past Friday a feature film dealing with a sensitive issue of special children Apna Asmaan silently made into all PVR cinema halls. Along with much publicised films like Dhamaal and Darling this film directed by adman Kaushik Roy also vied for attention.

The director has not only touched upon a sensitive subject in his first film but has also roped in Irrfan Khan, Rajat Kapoor, Shobana and Anupam Kher who are among the best actors in the film industry. He has also introduced a teenage Dhruv who plays an adolescent child of Irrfan and Shobana. He is a slow learner and has some autistic traits. Kapoor plays Dhurav’s doctor and Kher is an ambitious allopath. Leslie Lewis has scored the music for the film.

The two-hour film is an outcome of Roy’s personal experience of looking after his own differently-abled son. “Once I had a dream that my special boy has become a celebrity. Media is running after him. We as parents are trying to get close to him but he has grown very arrogant. It was very disturbing. I thought to myself why I dreamt of it? This dream triggered an idea to make this film. Otherwise, actually, I wanted to make a light film but the concern for kids like mine always used to be a constant returning point for me. I wanted to share with people how they should first learn to ‘accept’ the ‘status’ of their child, how they can take care of their special kids without having great expectations and how they can nurture their natural talent without thrusting their own ambitions on them. I was discouraged by one and all from taking this ‘risk’,” says Roy wistfully.

If he could easily decide on “credible and believable actors” to do the talking of his heart, finding a 15-year-old who could play ‘Buddhi’, the special kid, was difficult. “I did several auditions and short listed three boys including Dhruv, who was a friend’s son. Dhruv didn’t turn up for the final audition so I refused to see him. But he insisted that he wanted to do the role and couldn’t turn up because he had his football tournament in Singapore. Out of the three boys, one was the next ‘superstar’ material so he wasn’t fitting the bill, the other one was weak in performance. But Dhruv was excellent. He was ‘moldable’ enough,” adds Roy.

Roy shot this small budget film on locations across Mumbai in just 32 days, “four minutes in a day” as he puts it. The very idea of making the film tax-free horrifies Roy, “I have leant that there are ‘distributors’ to do it!”

But the film which has already earned “the German Star of India” award at the Stuttgart Festival as the best feature film and has been screened at Cannes Film Festival, has also found a partner in London’s 300-year-old Twinges Tea, who will promote the film as their philanthropic exercise.

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