Neuchâtel 2024 Interview: ENNENNUM Director Shalini Ushadevi Talks About Immortality

This year at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival, several juries awarded several films. The Critic's Jury awarded their prize by unanimous decision to Ennennum, an extremely well-written science fiction drama in which Ouso and Devi, a married couple, get confronted with the possibilities (and pitfalls) of technological immortality. You can read my review here. A week later I had the chance to interview its writer and director Shalini Ushadevi, so we sat down for a talk.

ScreenAnarchy: Congratulations on your win. I was on that jury and it was the shortest deliberation ever, we all had your film as number one on our separate lists.

Shalini Ushadevi: Thank you, that is great to know, that is very validating also.

I heard it took a long time to get the movie to the screen. It is now 2024, I heard you started to write it in 2011 already? Is that right?

That is right. After my first film I started writing on this one because I heard about this project, the Singularity Project, that was looking to download the human consciousness into a chip and the predicted date for that was 2035. When I first read that article I was struck by it, the idea of immortality as possibility, and immediately started writing. Initially it was supposed to be like a really small film, with just two characters, but as the years flew by the canvas grew larger and larger. Ironically it became really huge. It resonated with all producers, but many had doubts whether this genre would work for the mainstream. After the pandemic I had to rethink the whole thing and kind-of scale it down a lot. It went back to its original form, primarily to these two characters. That's the journey of the film, it started as a very small film, it expanded to a very big one and then it went back to how it started, but now much richer, as I had to condense all the other strands into a smaller... well, not smaller, the canvas shrunk but the scope of it did not. I had to layer it a lot more. So I guess it needed this much time to become what it is.

Where there other inspirations? Because we as the jury all thought it looked like a REALLY good episode of Black Mirror. Are you a fan of science fiction in general?

Not at all actually, at least not before I started writing this, which was before Black Mirror. The idea evolved out of something else. It started with just this new technology and it became a philosophical quest in the following years. Because when I thought about immortality I basically thought about... OK, you're not going into immortality alone, right? This offers the option of going into it with other people, so who would you go into immortality with, and then that begs the question of: for how long are you willing to... (laughs) put up with somebody? How much of them are you willing to put up with? Because eternity... as they say, right, all love stories become great at the END. So if a love story has no end, what becomes of that love? Ehm... am I making sense?

Yes! You also put that great line from the film in the trailer: "if a story does not end, how can we tell if it is good or bad?" I'm now even more curious how the 'large canvas ' version of the film would have been.

I'm still hoping a producer will come in and say: "let's make the larger version", because it was such a different film and of a very different scale. You know? In this film I'm dealing with two types of love. Romantic love, like personal romantic love, and the love we have of public figures. Just as relationships are unpredictable and can go into any direction in any time, I don't think public figures necessarily have control over the narratives of their own lives. And within this film, I also show that they don't have the right to really die. We immortalize so many of our public figures. We are not allowed to question them. We are not allowed to rewrite the narrative, and it may-or-may-not be what the figures themselves had wanted. These are the two things I'm looking at so to that end, the political party was a whole other part of it. In the more fleshed-out version there would be a strand that an immortal politician can run in the elections, and other party members would be like "So when do WE ever get a chance if we immortalize this person?". We tend to pedestalize people during their lifetime for their achievements, so when someone like that dies and you blindly immortalize them, it becomes very problematic. It does not allow for social discourse, it does not allow for political discourse, beyond a point.

It is already such a dense film, with the romantic and political plot, that we were really impressed with how you handled the technical exposition. You almost made it both the comic relief and source of suspense in the film, which, in my opinion, is a stroke of genius.

So that character, the agent who sells them the immortality policies, his name is Jeeva, which means 'life'. Life was the inspiration for this character, in a relation life throws curveballs at you when you don't expect it. And it evolved, it was not originally intended as comic relief, but life is like that and sometimes there is nothing to do but to laugh at it, because it is so unpredictable and so irrepressible. Life has no respect or concern or consideration for you, so that's what I drew for this character. What he does, that's how life treats us all. I mapped out the film emotionally first, and then fitted in the science, the science fiction elements, into that emotional chart. So for me, even the technology actually represents the emotions. That's why most of the exposition is conversational. I look at the emotion behind it and that is why Jeeva is so... I don't know if funny is the right word... he is very irreverent. Because I do think that how we respond to life is beyond us, it's always uncontrollable what it throws at you. So that's why the exposition comes across like that, because I am always looking at the emotions each new piece of information brings about.

All three main actors were great actually, it looked natural. Was there much room in the script for improvisation?

Ajithlal Sivaval is a brilliant actor, a theatre artist. He interpreted Jeeva in his own way, the lines were written so that they can be said in a variety of ways. I was also very pleasantly surprised, quite a few times, by his deadpan delivery, his matter-of-fact way to tell the truth bombs. Before the shoot we had a workshop. As the actors were playing the scenes they were improvizing, owning the lines, so they could say them with their own style. The ideas were all intact, the philosophies were intact, but the deliveries, style and the way they communicated it, they often simplified it and made it more natural by owning it. I wrote my script in English, not in Malayalam, so it got translated and my team, assistant directors and such, they also made it seem more natural. I mean I'm conversant in Malayalam, it's not that I don't know the language. But with the science fiction in it, it needed extra effort to make it sound natural, and the translation helped. And then the actors used that in the workshop and contributed as well.

If you wrote it in English, why did you choose Malayalam as the language instead of English?

There were multiple reasons. I am from Kerala, where they speak Malayalam. And in Kerala we are known for easily embracing technology, we're unassuming about that, on the surface you wouldn't think much changes. We are early adopters of most technologies. I would not be surprised if something like this situation plays out in Kerala. While all else remains the same, the technology could have a deep impact. Also, Kerala has a very prolific film industry, which is going through a golden era right now, a great moment. A lot of our filmmakers have great voices and are able to explore a certain kind of themes and find audience acceptance. I think there were two Malayalam films at Rotterdam this year.

The cast really stands out. Did it take you a long time finding the actors, or did you already have a group in mind?

Santhy Balachandran was the first one to come on board, a friend of mine recommended her after watching her in a play. She agreed to come down for an audition and read the script. Her response to the script was really insightful, useful for me. Her interpretation of the character was spot-on, so early on I already knew she would be the perfect fit for Devi. What I love about her performance is how nuanced it is, how she captures the subtleties in the relationship dynamics. You're very aware of her inner world and inner conflicts even though her performance is subtle. At the workshops, Anoop Mohandas came in to audition for another character, the neighbour. I had worked with him previously and am a fan of his work, I like his work a lot, so I asked him to stand-in for Ouso in some of the workshops. And I thought the chemistry between these two was so great, the give-and-take within the scenes was so great, that they just made sense together. For Jeeva, it was Anoop who recommended Ajithlal for the character, he brought him in. He had actually attended a clowning workshop Ajit offered, that's how he knew him. Ajithlal also conducts theatre workshops, he is a huge fount of talent. We tried out a conflict scene and an exposition scene and his range was impressive.

I need to ask you about the location you used, that fantastic house of glass and concrete. How did that come about?

The house is by a very accomplished architect, Vinu Daniel. A friend had introduced me to his work and we were supposed to shoot at one of the other houses he designed, but that didn't work out due to logistical reasons. He recommended another house but that also did not work out. Funding became an issue as well around that time and I thought I'd have to shelf the project again. Then one day, when I checked his Instagram, I found pictures of this house. And instantly, I felt like OK now I can make this film. The house inspired me and was kind-of a catalyst for me to resurrect the production, to bring the film back to life. Because the house is called Chuzhi, which means vortex. You can see there are spirals within the construction. For me it became a symbol of the film itself, encapsulating everything. The film is all about characters spiralling upwards, downwards, inwards, outwards... So the minute I saw his Instagram post, I just felt this great surge of inspiration. It was exactly... if I make this film within this space, the space becomes a character and it will tell the story. I am very thankful to Vinu for having designed it. It automatically took care of much of the production design, it was already there, which gave me the courage to continue with the film. The film could breathe with the house, we could just allow the house to capture some of the abstractions we were going for. My fantastic director of photography, Sreekanth Sivaswamy, he and I worked at a lot of static shots, where the visual vocabulary of the film is very much highlighting and embracing the structure of the house itself. The lines of the house just allow for storytelling on a different level.

It looks believable as a place to live in, especially for a sleep lab technician with a practice at home, yet also believable as a science fiction location.

The architect is also from Kerala, and his style has also evolved out of his life's experiences. Though we can see the house as futuristic, it is very much a product of the Now. It was not commissioned for the film (obviously) but it is meant as a residence for today, Vinu did not see it as a house for the future, it is for Now. In that way, Ennennum is set today, it is not a future, it is an alternate present. It was interesting and important for the structure to also tell that story. It is not meant to show something in the future, but something that has already come to pass, that exists.

Thank you for this interview.




Ennenum is currently on the international festival circuit, for more information, contact Hyperbole films.

(All screenshots of Ennennum © courtesy of Hyperbole Films)
(Top picture © Miguel Bueno / NIFFF 2024)