Kaanch

Kaanch (Glass) was our DP-III Fiction project at the National Institute of Design, mentored by Dr. Shilpa Das. Jayasri directed it and I shot it.

Sarva (Zankhana Patel) is a single mother who keeps hitting a ceiling at her corporate job while raising her daughter Ani (Jenya Parmar). There’s no big melodramatic scene. The film stays with small daily pressures: the rush of the morning routine, an office that doesn’t care, and the guilt of being seen as absent or self-centred. Glass shows up throughout, as the invisible barrier at work and as something fragile at home.

I split the look between cramped apartment interiors and Ahmedabad’s busy streets.

• Handheld in the market. We filmed near Kagdi Bridge and the stationery markets without closing the road. A small handheld rig let me move through the crowd and stay close to Sarva and Ani.
• Reflections. I used shallow focus to separate the two of them from the street clutter, and framed through shop windows, glass panes and mirrors whenever I could.
• Window light at home. The apartment scenes used daylight from the windows and a few practical lamps, which kept skin tones soft and the house looking like a real one.