I guess y’all have heard about Peddlers by now… Yep, that Anurag Kashyap-produced film that has been making all the right noises. Well, that film screened on the 21st of May at the 65th Cannes Film Festival as a contender in the International Critics’ Week. Read on for all the deets of this film, and pics from the glitzy world premiere at Cannes last night 🙂
Directed by Vasan Bala, who also did the screenwriting, the film’s set in Mumbai and tells the story of three parallel lives in 116 minutes. It essentially deals with one’s inability to accept love in life; a strange psyche that enables one to self-sabotage any such occurrence which may lead to care, comfort, tenderness and togetherness. Intrigued…? I am, more so ‘cos one of the three plotlines involves a Bangladeshi! (Indeed I am one :-D) Okay, here’s how the story unfolds…
- An intelligence officer (played by the lush Gulshan Devaiah) at the Narcotics Control Bureau who will go to any extent to live a lie: he has intimacy issues because of his physical condition but yet he wants to be known as a playboy in spite of his issues, in spite of being in love with his married neighbour. And then…
- A Bangladeshi immigrant who is terminally ill and has come here to work as a “Mule” (human carrier) to make enough money to treat herself and take care of her child back home. There is love knocking around somewhere but…
- A young boy (played by newbie actor Siddharth Menon) with misled notions of rebellion and freedom which has driven him out of his Upper Middle Class homely comforts and into the so-called dark and dingy underbelly. This woman he meets, frail, lost, unaffected, mysterious yet beautiful is not his type, or at least that’s what he thought, but…
In a nutshell, the film is “a criss-cross in the lives of the self-proclaimed social outcasts eventually leading to love and the destruction of it.” It also stars Nimrat Kaur, Kriti Malhotra (that girl Aamir Khan was fascinated with in Dhobi Ghat). Guneet Monga co-produced the film with Anurag Kashyap, and it is distributed by Eros International [India]. Music’s by Karan Kulkarni, who apparently worked as part of the music department for Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, Ishaqzaade, English Vinglish and Trishna.
Ah, we wish them all the best!
P.S. Here are the pics from the premiere last night…