Director Ritesh Batra talks to Divya Kaushik about his cannes-acclaimed film The lunchbox that now has distributors worldwide
It’s impossible to beat India when it comes to our food, culture and habits. Probably he knows and understands this very well and therefore his debut film has every ingredient that took the Western film critics by surprise. A genuine, well-packaged story won its first award at the Cannes and till date it continues to run on a winning track. Recently The lunchbox by Ritesh Batra was screened at the Odessa International Film Festival in Ukraine. Batra won the best director award and the festival’s director, Dennis Ivanov commented, “If I would be the Juror, I would give all my prizes to your film!” Batra was expecting this kind of response worldwide. “I am thrilled at the response. The film is sold completely to major distributors across the globe, even in markets like Japan. After I was done with the script I started looking for an Indian producer who would be ready to collaborate with an international production. It helps in taking Indian stories to the wider audience and I decided to screen the film at the international film festivals so that it would make people aware of the work of Indian directors,” shared the director, who graduated from New York University’ Tisch School of the Art Film programme. Writing is his first love and even before he thought to be a director, he dreamt to be a screenwriter. He was selected for the Sundance Writers and Directors labs for his script of The Story of Ram. “I was always into writing but I worked as a consultant for three years. At one point I realised that it is not something that I want to do, so I decided to take up a course from New York. I made several short films that included The Morning Ritual and Gareeb Nawaz Ki Taxi. I fell in love with directing. I have grown up in Mumbai and we all know there have been several documentaries on the system of dabbawallas, but nothing on the stories that they have. I started researching a documentary on Mumbai dabbawallas. I spent over a week with them and realised that they have many stories about people. like some housewife cooks in a particular way and some keeps a note in the tiffin. So I became interested in people who were cooking and eating the lunchboxes. So I started writing a script and all the dabbawallas I met are a part of my film,” shared Batra, about his film that features Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Irrfan Khan and Nimret Khan. The lunchbox tells the story of a middle-class housewife Ila who is trying to add some spice to her married life. A wrong dabba delivery connects her to Saajan Fernandes, a lonely man in the dusk of his life. It is their love story and the film brings out different aspects of life and exposes Mumbai through the vision of the director.
Batra says that he is inspired by subjects that interest the youth and define India. “All my stories are very culturally rooted,” he commented and added that his cinematic inspiration has been iconic names like Guru Dutt, Satyajit Ray and louis Malle and Ingrid Bergman. The director believes that a few recent films have changed the world’s perception on indie films and the phenomenon will continue in the times to come. His next film is about a photographer based in Mumbai.
The lunchbox releases in India on September 20.