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Amid a slew of narratives that emerged from the two brutal years of the COVID pandemic, Mihir Fadnavis’s Lords of Lockdown stands out for more reasons than one. The director who is now three films old, states that the entire team has managed to ‘capture a slice of history’ with this recent documentary. The film, as the name suggests captures the growing wage gap and ground reality that the pandemic inflicted on India’s financial capital, Mumbai.
Inspired by the documentary works of Matthew Heineman, Joshua Oppenheimer and Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, Fadnavis and his team ventured out into what was nothing short of a battlefield on the ground in Mumbai. Mihir realised that the crisis that the country was dealing with at the moment was certainly not something that can be expressed unidimensionally. Keeping this in mind, he adopts a multi-perspective narrative style to translate the realities of the lockdown affected the masses through powerful, gripping visuals.
Shooting a documentary can be a challenging ordeal by itself. To do so in a restrictive and arduous atmosphere while a crisis unfolds makes this challenge all the more strenuous. As a first-time director, Mihir shares with us what the journey of documenting the lockdown was like.
“During the shoot, I had to calculate simultaneously how I’d edit things together, daylight changes, and also worry about what aspects to make the effort of filming because there was just so much happening. Once the filming wrapped the real challenge was the edit and post-work – all of which were a bit tough given the restrictions of the pandemic, the completely indie nature of the production, the minimalism of our filming equipment and me being a newbie director. But mainly, the target was to capture the lockdown as a wide chronicle, from many angles and focus on the singular message of the film – the hunger problem of India.”
— Mihir Fadnavis, Director/Filmmaker
The film documents the unfolding of the migrant exodus placed against the backdrop of India’s unlikely heroes rising up to the occasion, an exploding wage gap, and a dangerous hunger problem that was emerging as a result of this.
The film which is produced by Anurag Kashyap and Navin Shetty has been officially selected to be screened at the 22nd New York Indian Film Festival virtually between the 1st and 14th of May 2022.
Follow Mihir’s work here.
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